Network shares: still talking about them in 2026

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By now, many of you have probably seen Linus Tech Tips’ “Linux is Easy, right?” video?

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://pointieststick.com/2026/06/22/network-shares-still-talking-about-them-in-2026/
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I am really happy network shares are being looked at! I was excited to see that in the STF grant’s goals.

I know there’s the comment in the beginning about how are people still using them, but there’s something to consider. Simple NAS boxes have become cheap enough and are being marketed towards non-techie consumers. Just plug in and go! Even a lot of wifi routers nowadays advertise just plugging in a USB drive and accessing it from any computer. All of this is done by using SMB/CIFS, and it’s not strictly limited to power users.

I’ll admit I do fall into the power user category (Synology NAS) and the method I’m most excited about is 8, using systemd mounts. kio-fuse has always caused issues for me. I’m the type to have a file open for hours or days via a network share, and always found kio-fuse unreliable to the point of possible data loss. Although reading through all the problems it probably fell under one of those.

I used smb4k initially, but it by default mounts drives in the home directory which causes all sorts of problems and is probably not recommended. I did eventually settle on systemd .mount files enabled on startup. Being able to do something similar using user units via Dolphin or some system setup GUI would be great.

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