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It's also not accurate to say that Windows systems cannot access NFS shares, because 
some versions actually can. By default, no version of Windows supports NFS 
outright, but some editions offer a plugin you can install that enables this support. 
The name of the NFS plugin in Windows has changed from one version to another 
(such as 
Services for UNIX
, 
Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications
, 
NFS Client
, 
and most recently, 
Windows Subsystem for Linux
) but the idea is the same. In 
the past, Microsoft required a more expensive Windows license on your laptop 
or desktop to allow the installation of the NFS client, but that's no longer the case. 
The Windows Subsystem for Linux can be installed on any version of Windows 10, 
so this licensing restriction only comes into play on older versions. If you do have 
legacy Windows machines in use (which is becoming increasingly rare), using NFS 
may actually increase costs. In that situation, Samba is a clear winner.
Regarding an all-Linux environment or a situation where you only have Linux 
machines that need to access your shares, NFS is a great choice because it integrates 
much more tightly with the rest of the distribution. Permissions can be more easily 
enforced and, depending on your hardware, performance may be higher. The 
specifics of your computing environment will ultimately make your decision for you. 
Perhaps you'll choose Samba for your mixed environment, or NFS for your all-Linux 
environment. Maybe you'll even set up both NFS and Samba, having shares available 
for each platform. My recommendation is to learn and practice both, since you'll use 
both solutions at one point or another during your career anyway.
Before you continue to the sections on setting up Samba and NFS, I recommend you 
first decide where in your filesystem you'd like to act as a parent directory for your 
file shares. This isn't actually 
required, but I think it makes for better organization. 
There is no one right place to store your shares, but personally I like to create a  
/share
 directory at the 
root
 filesystem and create sub-directories for my network 
shares within it. For example, I can create 
/share/documents
, 
/share/public
, and so 
on for Samba shares. With regard to NFS, I usually create shared directories within 
/exports
. You can choose how to set up your directory structure. As you read the 
remainder of this chapter, make sure to change my example paths to match yours 
if you use a different style.