No, just as a AD member server. Without winbindd, samba has to fall back to the libc pam/nss functionality which is not as full-featured as the one provided by

No, just as a AD member server. Without winbindd, samba has to fall back to the libc pam/nss functionality which is not as full-featured as the one provided by winbindd. So there's some performance benefits which might or might not matter for you, but there's also some cases that don't work at all without winbindd; at least we were unable to allow non-domain clients (e.g. personal laptops) access to a smb share without winbindd. If you dig into this topic you can find mails from samba core devs on samba-technical saying that you REALLY should run winbind for a samba AD member server.