We are using several Kubuntu 20 systems in our university work group. We are experienced software developers but no Linux administrators. We want to access samba shares on a NAS from those multi-user PCs. Shares are important for us. We have tried a lot to achieve this in a usable way and are about to give up.
Dolphin allows to mount network folders (I guess via KIO). Works, but files are not accessible via non-KDE-applications and bash. Very, very hard to use.
We tried mount command with sudo and KDE wallet via CLI. Did not work since students are not sudoers.
We tried mount command without sudo and KDE wallet via CLI. Did not work since -o is not allowed then.
We tried auto-mount via fstab. Did not work since we are not allowed to store unencrypted passwords in fstab or in credential files.
We tried mount command together with fstab. Did not work since users would need to enter their password many times for each share. We could not find a way to link this e.g. with KDE wallet CLI.
There are other tools like gigolo for non-KDE distributions but they seem to be incompatible to Kubuntu.
We tried to use smb4k for a long time but it crashes; it is busy all the time making the users wait for for up to 10 minutes; it does not show any error messages if something goes wrong; it does not reliably mount shares; is does not reliably unmount shares; it does not correctly handle changes in credentials and mount settings; users had strange effects like seeing shared mounted by other users and some other undefinable glitches.
Can someone point me to a usable solution (other than using Windows)?