I think you are grossly missing the point of ROCK (or Nucleus). ROCK is highly opinionated to do things that we feel will lead to success for most users. It was a no-brainer for us to not include NFS support in ROCK. You may run into many opinions with ROCK that you may disagree with, but because it’s not a general-purpose/flexible operating system, you are free to install your own favorite distribution and use RoonServer on that.
Now, to address this outrageous claim about a “stupid decision”.
Here are my assumptions about NFS vs SMB:
- NFS has huge gaps in OS support, where as SMB support is at 100%.
- NFS’s performance advantage over SMB is not a thing for music files. You can see that for music files (big files, not tiny files), the performance difference is negligibly better at best, and nil at worst.
- NFS is notoriously bad at dealing with connection drops, which are common on home networks.
In fact, I would go one step further and say network block storage has destroyed the utility of NFS even in the server/enterprise/cloud space.
My guess is that NFS will continue its slow fade into obscurity.
You are streaming at extremely low rates… and NFS has a tiny performance gain at those file sizes. NFS has a noticable improvement when the files are tiny, which is useless for music.
RoonServer, the part that talks to the filesystem, supports Linux just fine. But this is moot, as @ged_hickman1’s point was that NFS lacks Windows support out of the box. Windows does have UI (not that it matters for filesystem support). I’m not sure what point you are trying to make here.