ChristophShy wrote:
What do you mean by real networking? WebDAV is a standard, well-known protocol, for all operating systems. Even better than SMB for portability.
Can you give me an example of a free client? My google search shows me only paid ones.
For now, I played a bit with my NAS and started NFS sharing in parallel. Good that I have it on my own server which I control. In off-the-shelf NAS that wouldn't be easy to achieve to fix file permissions.
SMB is the only network protocol that Apple supports.
Of course macOS includes drivers for other networking systems like WebDAV and NFS. But if there are bugs in any of these (and there are), or if something breaks due to an unrelated security update, for example, Apple isn't going to fix them.
I'm afraid that you will have to abandon WebDAV if you want to use a Mac. Even with SMB, it still isn't the kind of networking you expect. You can download files and upload files, but that's really all that it supports. If you try to navigate a network volume in the Finder, or try to directly open files on the server, you may have problems. If this is your own server and nobody else is on it, then you probably won't have any corrupt files. But you might have to restart your Mac, or at least the Finder, when it locks up.
Years ago, I wrote a little app that did just what you are looking for. It would mount remote volumes like sshfs or ftp directly in the Finder. I used WebDAV as an intermediary. My app would connect to the remote server and re-serve the data locally via WebDAV. Then the Mac would connect to the app using WebDAV. But I didn't realize how buggy WebDAV was internally. I spent a lot of time on that app and had to abandon it.
Even at $50, the market simply isn't viable. No one can afford to develop or maintain an app like this. People need to earn a living. Customers like you expect Apple to do it based on legacy expectations and purported compatibility protocols. But that just isn't going to happen. You have to look at the bigger picture. You can get more checkbox feature functionality from Linux or Windows. But the overall user experience isn't going to be as good.
