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Gotta say, using SMB with Apple clients is a massive pain in the ass. I imagine a large part of that is just Microsoft cruft, leaving you to deal with limitations designed around Windows. And you don't really have another option after Apple deprecated AFP.

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Apple refuse to pay Microsoft the license for their SMB stack and have dropped open source Samba due to license conflicts with GPL, and so have developed their own implementation (SMBX). This is the reason it is so buggy, and there are loads of articles and posts all over the internet about it. Heres one example from the top of google.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/18sjnwb/state_of_mac...

Sometimes I wish Apple had gone-head-to-head with Samba and forked v4 and kept it GPL-2 - they might have had enough power to force the issue.

It’s the insane having these discussions in 2026 given samba issues have been a thing as long I’ve been using OSX/macOS. Mixed windows/mac network shares have always been a PITA.

I feel the same about Linux clients. I wish there was some focus there.

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