NFSD With Linux 6.6 Brings A Thrilling New Feature

[zilexa]

Does anyone use NFS? Is it popular? Or does everyone just use Microsofts SMB/CIFS?

Setting up NFSv4.2 properly in a home or small office is extremely difficult and nowhere documented properly for people with basic knowledge.
I spend many nights trying to figure it out. There was not a single step by step guide online.. only for much older NFS versions that didn't even support something as basic as server-side-copy.
You can find my work/guide here.

https://github.com/zilexa/Homeserver/tree/master/Filesystems-guide/networkshares_HowTo-NFSv4.2

I stopped using NFS, after I renamed a folder on a client (laptop connected via WiFi) that contained 600GB of files and folders, which caused that folder on the server to get deleted. I thought, while NFSv4 is great, it's too easy to mess up my precious photo collection. And too difficult to setup properly.
The 600 GB renamed folder would probably be uploaded to the server, but a rename should just initiate a rename on the server, instead of causing wear on the SSDs in the server, and massive load on my WiFi.
In panic, I interrupted the WiFi connection, to stop it from deleting files server-side.
Of course, after many sleepless nights I now had more of those ahead trying to figure out how to restore the data (I had no proper daily backup system yet).

(Now, instead I use FileRun on my home server (docker based), a self hosted filemanagement system (feature rich and easy to use) with pretty good webDAV support. My laptop's/miniPCs simply use the Nexcloud desktop client to connect to my FileRun instance and stay in sync.
For Android mobile devices I use Folder sync to sync photos and some app data.
My server creates nightly (BTRFS) snapshots.)
I have 9 users (5 different households) relying on this setup now. No issues.)

[piorunz]

Does anyone use NFS? Is it popular? Or does everyone just use Microsofts SMB/CIFS?

Yes, I use it, because all my computers are Linux. So all my network shares and homeserver NAS is via NFS.
Where I interconnect with remote Windows VPS, I use SyncThing.

[oibaf]

I use NFS a lot in the data center.

I also did a performance test (reading many small files (backup operations with some different tools)): NFS 4.2 is 8-10x faster than SMB 3.1.1.

The storage was the same.
SMB was using the storage native NetApp OS.
NFS was provided by a VM with Debian 12.

[binarybanana]

Windows itself has pretty good support for NFSv3, but only the more enterprisey variants (protip: get LTSC).