Another vote for Debian here. Very low-maintenance distro and you can install it with as many or as few packages as you wish.

SMB is weird, do you have the option to run NFS on the share instead? Since NFS is made for Unix systems, it’s what I’ve always gone for.

Studied languages at a university in Sweden, using only libre programs, except for one group assignment where we used Google docs. Nothing terribly interesting (computer-wise). Everything worked. Professors wanted .docx files, which LibreOffice happily exported. If I was so inclined, nothing would’ve stopped me from using something like OpenBSD, or hell, even Haiku would probably work.

Yeah, I get that. I was daily driving Guix for quite a long time and really enjoyed it. As I understand it shares a lot of code with Nix. It’s just been a bit hard to integrate with a lot of the software I run due to it not being compatible with the traditional filesystem hierarchy. This is obviously a selling point for Nix/Guix as it frees it to try new ideas, but makes it harder for me to run my music production software for example, which I can’t run in flatpak officially and since it Just Works™ on Debian, I’m happy with it. Maybe I’ll get into it sometime again as the community seems to have grown a lot, and I’ve looked into running Nix on top of my Debian install.