I just use sshfs for most things today. It's by far the simplest to set up (just run sshd), has good authentication and encryption (works over the internet), and when I measured performance vs. NFS and Samba some years ago it seemed roughly identical (this is mostly for large files; it's probably slower for lots of small files – measure your own use case if performance is important). I don't know about file locking and that type of thing – it perhaps does poorly there(?) It's not something I care about.