Well, for one, it’s network attached storage. If it’s not present in the network for one reason or another, guess what, your OS doesn’t boot… or it errors during boot, depending on how the kernel was compiled and what switches your bootloader sends to the kernel during boot. Second, this is an easy way for malware to spread, especially if it’s set to run after user logon.
If you’re hunting down older eqipment (5, 6 years old), no, not really… everything just works with Linux and older stuff. The newer stuff is always the problem with any OS that is not Windows (though that is changing for the better in the last few years, especially for Linux).
I thought most of the FOSS ones were like libraries, just drop them in the adequate shared directory and that’s it 🤔. You could check dependencies with ldd and look for the adequate package with xtools.