Ubuntu Mate is the only distribution I have tried on my new RPi, and I am impressed with how well it works. I wanted to get file sharing working with the Windows computers on my LAN. It was not trivial, so I thought I might share my experience for the potential benefit to others who wish to do such file sharing.
I installed the Synaptic Package Manager using
sudo apt-get install synaptic
since it handles package dependencies automatically.
Using it, I installed samba, samba-config, and cifs-utils.
I set my Workgroup name to “WORKGROUP” on my WIndows computers. Not wanting to deal with login hassles on my one-user network, I made my shares from Windows be available for “Everyone” with all permissions and I gave Everyone all capabilities.
samba-config would not run for me. I found the cure for that here:
After configuring some shared folders in samba-config, I could access them from Windows. However, when I tried to access a WIndows computer from Linux, I got “Failed to Retrieve Share List from Server.” I found a cure for that here: https://www.liberiangeek.net/2012/03/how-to-fix-failed-to-retrieve-share-list-from-server-in-ubuntu-12-04-11-10-when-file-sharing-with-windows/
So, in /etc/samba/smb.conf, I added the line
name resolve order = bcast host
as line 30 (after workgroup = WORKGROUP), and it all started working.