I’m new to Manjaro, I used Ubuntu for 10 years. I always mounted the samba shares of my NAS using fstab. In Manjaro I mounted them using Dolphins GUI. But this is not working good. There are lots of programs which cannot access the mounted shares using their regular file explorer. It is not even possible to extract files to the shares using Ark. It says it can only extract to local storage.
Are there any settings to change that? Or is fstab the best way for mounting shares?
That depends on what you are used to - if you are used to fstab setup then fstab it is.
I have been there too - and in my opinion/experience systemd mount and automont is way easier to understand and maintain and less prone to spelling or option errors.
No matter how you prefer it - you will need to mount your shares before applications can use them.