Need advise: sharing files between linux hosts

Hello hive mind,

I am currently contemplating what is the best way to share files and folder between machines. In general sharing them between different operating systems like GNU/Linux, Windows and MacOS would be nice. However if you have a recommendation for a much better technology that does it only between GNU/Linux based systems I am all ears.

I currently have a little bit of experience running a Samba server but I have also heard NFS is the way to use on *NIX based systems. I have no prior experience with NFS (or iSCSI) in regards to it having any advantage over a simple samba share. From my point of view NFS is samba for *NIX and iSCSI are shares for exporting storage units for things like VMs. Input on security aspects would also be appreciated.

What´s wrong with samba though? Maybe NFS is better, i have no idea tbh never felt the need to experiment with NFS given that smb does just fine at maxing out my 1 gbit connection and works everywhere.


Looking from what other people say. It appears SMB is faster (on windows) and NFS is faster for linux/unix based systems. But I haven´t had a problem on any of my Linux machines either. If you wanted to you could do both and use NFS on macOS/Linux and SMB on Windows.


I pretty much just use samba, sftp between machines where it´s not a regular occurance. Sftp is just ftp over ssh, so no setup required besides ssh.

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NFS is better (easier) on Linux over SMB/CIFS as it has less overhead and is easy to install/configure. I actually use it to mount an NFS share over the LAN from my file-server to my desktop.

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To be honest I have no idea if something is wrong with Samba. I find it only tedious to setup. I also have no background information on its security. I had never really looked at other options this is where my questions stems from.

Thank you I will have a look. The configuration process is tiresome with Samba.

Do any of you know how well Samba and NFS handle connection reestablishment after the switch to a different AP?

So samba, in my opinion, is the best option for cross platform sharing. If you need windows, Linux and osx support, I would go with that.

If you do not need windows support, NFS would be my recommendation. As I do not use windows for anything but games, most of my shares are NFS, and I’m perfectly happy using filezilla to copy files when I occasionally need something from my NAS

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I’ve been “sharing” files around the household via Syncthing. Its cross platform pretty much for everything except for iOS, and even there they have Mobius Sync to bridge things (it is not open source though).

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