"Shared Folders" is NOT useful

Development Discussion
#1

"Sharing Services are not installed."

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That is about as helpful as the proverbial screen door on a submarine.

I do have the following packages installed:
caja-share
gadmin-samba
gnome-system-tools
libsmbclient
libwbclient0
python-samba
samba
samba-common
samba-common-bin
samba-dsdb-modules
samba-libs
samba-vfs-modules
smbclient
system-config-samba

I strongly suspect the problem is the lack windbind and a WINS server as well has not having all the tweaks to the Samba configuration exactly right.

Getting SAMBA to actually work in Linux is a bloody nightmare. To begin with there is the “system-config-samba” bug of the missing file “/etc/libuser.conf” that was reported years ago and never addressed. The alternatives that I can find are Swat, GAdmin SAMBA or editing the configuration files manually with ‘root’ authority. All of the above involve way more detail than the casual user is interested in or likely to be totally familiar with. As an example of how COMPLEX this task is, just reference the number of tutorials and help files that exist on the subject. Add to that most are out of date or miss seemingly minor details that are CRITICAL.

This is where Microsoft is years, if not decades, ahead of of Linux. They make the minimal installation of a desktop OS fast, simple and reliable for the casual users. The same can not be said for any flavor of Linux I have ever tasted. This is a problem that NEEDS to be addressed.

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#2

I totally agree with the point about how many Samba tutorials there are out there, pretty much all of them having missing or incorrect information, however putting another one out there to fix the problem seems sort of like this classic from xkcd https://xkcd.com/927/ . And it’s not just setting up the Samba share, mounting it on the remote computer such that the remote user has correct access to create and delete files is not well documented.

The other place I think Linux is sorely lacking is locales. I’m from Canada and so en_CA seems like the sensible choice, until you realize that it uses the date format 31-12-1969 (which is just wrong, IMO). But fixing that is not easy and again, none of the tutorials give you all the info you need.

This is obviously not an Ubuntu MATE discussion, but it’s the type of thing that keeps Linux from getting better penetration - if even technical people can get caught up in the details, how is the average user supposed to muddle through?

That said, I’m a huge Ubuntu MATE fan, it’s the perfect distro for me and I’m looking forward to 18.04 in a few days! Much appreciation to everyone who has worked so hard on it!

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