Help me understand the difference between Ubuntu and Debian

[EliteAlien]

It seems SMB is better for Windows and NFS is better Linux.

Furthest from the truth. Samba works great on Linux. I use it all the time. In fact I think NFS is lesser in some cases. NFS does not have the same security as Samba does out of the box. If you start NFS in most default setups it will attach itself to your whole network so anyone with your subnet can connect to it just by using the IP's 192.168.1.1/24 for example. Also it doesn't always have any encryption or authentication methods on default setups. You then have to set the IP's you choose to allow if you don't want that to happen. Though the thing is if you don't static them or someone else your local ip. Which in theory you can spoof that and/or your user id so that NFS thinks your the user at that IP. There is ways of hardening NFS more, but out of the gate it's not Samba. So when you go and add the extra security layers it slows down as it adds the additional overhead. So speeds of Samba and NFS are virtually the same at that point. You can remove some of the overhead of Samba by removing some of the security features in its config file. Though once you do that well it kind of defeats the point.

From using both I've seen not much of a major difference myself. One is slightly better with small files and one is slightly better with larger files. Though real world usage you wouldn't notice this much. I think it comes down to a few things with NFS vs Samba. One how your OS sets up the Samba and NFS configuration out of the gate. (Because tweaking them regardless of the two is usually a good idea depending on your use case.) Then how willing you are to tinker with it. Because you can make Samba or NFS more secure or less secure with their configurations. You can even limit connections based on versions of the software, refusing older versions connections and stuff. Though the more you add, the more overhead and thinking it has to do before it makes a connection.

Edit: If you do use NFS I would suggest making sure you understand your configuration. Specially if you ever expose a network for outside access. Because there is a "Root Squashing" issue with NFS. Where remote users can gain full root level access to all your files. Just by having a local IP. Since as I was saying, out of the gate, not all configurations are equal. Your NAS might be a bit more hardened, but I would still suggest looking at your configuration and understanding it. Because even inside the network, you can still give read and write access to all users inside that network by using a local IP and having a similar user id.