(sorry in advance for the long post)

What I'm looking for:

Basically, without a lot of work to setup and maintain a Domain/Kerberos server, what's the best way to provide consistent logins and remote folder/share (from a server) access across various Linux desktops

I've configured domain controllers using Samba. I've also configured Linux systems as domain-joined hosts. Between the two I tend to find that keeping talking - especially for systems that are only on infrequently - can be a bit troublesome. Updates sometimes break the Samba server, tokens expire, etc etc

I've also used NFS of various versions, but found v4 with the Kerberos implementation a bit finicky (for similar reasons to the SMB based implementation). NFSv3 of course is fairly fast and efficient, but lacks the user-level authentication and relies on IP's for access-control.

Now it's been awhile since I've given a shot at this except for some NFS shares between VMs and SSHFS for desktops, it would be nice to have a consistent but easily maintainable way to provided common shares for larger files (videos, albums, 3d models, and projects etc) without having to constantly troubleshoot. Maybe the domain/NFS route had gotten easier but it still seems to be fairly manual at times.