I run CachyOS on my personal laptop, and had a problem where I was using a gvfs-based file manager and I couldn’t auto-discover my NAS on the network.

Quick fix

Make sure you have avahi installed, and that the avahi-daemon service is running. Then make sure you have the relevant gvfs packages installed.

You only need the ones relevant to the protocols you want to use.

sudo pacman -S \
  avahi \
  gvfs \
  gvfs-dnssd \
  gvfs-smb \
  gvfs-nfs \
  gvfs-afc \
  gvfs-wsdd

• avahi — Core avahi package
• gvfs — Core gvfs package
• gvfs-dnssd — For DNS-SD (Service Discovery)
• gvfs-smb — For SMB/CIFS network shares
• gvfs-nfs — For NFS network shares
• gvfs-afc — For Apple File Conduit (AFC) protocol, used by iOS devices
• gvfs-wsdd — Adds discovery via WSD (the Windows discovery protocol)

There are other gvfs packages for other protocols, but these are the most common ones for network discovery and file sharing.

Why?

The avahi package provides the core functionality for network discovery using the mDNS/DNS-SD protocols. This is the official linux equivalent to Apples “Bonjour”.

The gvfs packages (Gnome Virtual File System) provide the necessary backend support for various network protocols, allowing any gvfs-based file manager to discover and access network resources seamlessly. Without these packages, your file manager won’t be able to find or connect to network devices like your NAS.

Packages like gvfs-smb enable connecting to SMB/CIFS shares, but gvfs-dnssd, handles the discovery of those shares on the network. So you need both to be able to find and connect to your network-shares.