Something is deeply broken with Samba in macOS, all Samba versions and all macOS versions.

It just never works. And just when you think it's finally reliable and has worked for a while, it breaks in new unexpected ways. Sometimes hanging the whole machine. This was with both macOS as a server and a Linux server (less issues with Linux, but still broken).

Samba isn't great on other OSs either, but not as broken as on macOS. At this point I've given up on Samba completely, and consider it something I won't use again.

Hmm interesting. Can you expand more. I've been using samba continuously on Mac for a few years now. It's been good for me so far. There is the need to reconnect every once in a while due to sleep and wake but other than that it's been consistently good

I haven’t had that level of issues with CIFS on Apple platforms in general.

For most of iOS 18 there was a bug where iOS and iPadOS simply couldn’t connect to Samba shares on Linux but that has since been resolved.

Apple does implement some custom functions that make CIFS (Samba or Windows based) shares less performant than Apple platform served shares in certain situations. Especially for server side copy. TrueNAS has recently patched this so that it works.

Adopting/inheriting a CIFS-backed Time Machine share is needlessly precarious.

I’ve had zero problem with macOS client against a Gentoo Linux samba server (with the apple extensions enabled for Time Machine, too).

Maybe your distro’s samba is out of date?

OS X used to use Samba, but Samba went GPL v3 so the rolled their own server implementation (smbx). The client is based on freebsd's code, I believe. https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/SMBClient

I find the other side of Samba can often have issues but updates have to be tested and managed carefully.

If/where there's hotfixes or patches needed, seeking scripts that can run when waking seem to be the only way to ensure any connectivity remains in place when opening one's laptop.