If there is one “Year of the Linux Desktop” milestone (for me), it is the day GNOME Files (Nautilus) stops treating SMB network shares like a cursed artifact and just copies files to and from my NAS quickly and reliably, without progress bars that stall every few seconds like it is crossing Mordor.
SMB network share access in Ubuntu is still a big papercut. In a completely normal home or small office setup, or a large enterprise environment, you have a file server or NAS that typically serves files over SMB, you open Files, connect to the share, and you drag or copy a folder over. That should be boring. Instead it is often slow, stuttery, and unreliable. Copying photos, moving project folders, transferring a big directory tree, or handling lots of small files should just work, including between different SMB shares, or even within the same share where a server-side copy should be possible.
The current desktop experience also makes SMB shares feel less like a normal filesystem location. Instead of a predictable mount point you can rely on everywhere, the share shows up as a per-user, session-scoped, long FUSE path that only appears after you have opened it in Files. That means if you try to use the share first from the terminal, a non-GNOME application, or an R/Python script, you can hit “path not found” or a hang, then you end up going back to Files and clicking the share just to make it exist. That is confusing, and it does not match the expectation of a normal, predictable mount point. By comparison, a kernel CIFS mount using the multiuser option is much closer to that expectation, with a stable path and predictable behaviour that works the same way from any application or script, and across users.
For Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, I would love to see SMB treated as a core desktop workflow with two clear goals: performance that matches expectations on a local network, and reliability that holds up under the common stuff people actually do. If the share is unavailable, it should fail fast with a clear error, recover cleanly when the network returns, and not leave apps hanging or the filesystem in a weird stuck state or crash the entire desktop.
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