KDE is going to fix network shares

I've had my share of issues with network shares on any operating system, but since I mostly use KDE these days I found this deep dive into how, exactly, network shares work in KDE quite interesting. It turns out that while network shares in KDE's Dolphin mostly work, it does involves a few layers that sometimes don't interact well with each other, leading to really curious and annoying problems with mounted shares not appearing, permission issues, and so on.

The biggest cause of problems is when using a non-KDE application in KDE that also happens to use a non-KDE save/open dialog. Such a non-KDE save/open dialog won't be able to see any network shared mounted by KDE, and sadly, quite a few applications you're likely to use on a KDE installation use non-KDE open/save dialogs, like Blender, GIMP, LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, Inkscape, Audacity, DaVinci Resolve, and more. That's one hell of a list of applications to offer inconsistent or outright broken access to network shares you've set up and mounted in KDE.

Luckily, this issue seems to be getting a ton of attention soon.

All is not lost. Happily, KDE just receivedan investment of over 1.2 million from the Sovereign Tech Fund, and it includes funding for improvements to KDE's network share handling!

Nate Graham

The project is in the planning phases at the moment, but they're considering a whole slew of possible changes, fixes, and workarounds to make this stupid and annoying problem just go away. In 2026, nobody should be dealing with manually editing /etc/fstab or getting frustrated over supposedly disappearing network shares.