I've been messing around with NAS solutions for a couple weeks now, because why not?
After a while of initially fucking around with various solutions, I settled on samba, because it's a major standard. It's easily supported, and supports integration with Linux Mint's integrated file explorer. That was actually a major factor when deciding on the protocol; if I can avoid messing with fstab and avoid manual mounting, I'd be really happy. That's not where I ended up, unfortunately.
The Raspbian package repos are, in my experience, extremely slow with updates. Ninja pre-dates version one, Python3 is still stuck on 3.5.2, and a lot of other packages are outdated. Installing from source isn't always easy, because they get new dependencies, and suddenly you have accidentally missing packages and compiling fails. So here's a list of some install guides for various tools.
Note
This is currently targeting a version of Raspbian that doesn't support 64 bit. When I get the updates that add support for 64 bit, I will be updating with 64 bit, and that'll likely be the only variant that gets updates. Especially for cases where specific binaries are necessary (for an instance with Clang), this will mean 32 bit won't be maintained by me.