I love LINUX and have been using mint and peppermint for around 10 years.
Yet LAN connections are always a problem with SAMBA… my main Box is using mint 19.3 and I am testing mint 20.3 on a laptop but mint 19.3 can not open shares on the mint 20.3 system.
My wife’s win 10 laptop also connected to the LAN and mint boxes can not open shares on win 10 but win 10 can open shares on mint boxes.
Really wish there was a Linux package that handled LAN shares properly.
This must put off windows users from changing to LINUX.
Erm, well, is it possible you are maybe not asking the best question?
I used to use Samba (a lot) probably 20 years ago, so much so that we used to use Linux servers on our local network for Windows computers to connect to, mainly because we found it so much more reliable (and easier) than using Windows servers. So, has Samba just gotten worse over the last 20 years? I rather doubt it. Is it more likely that the long term issues are either down to a certain company just not caring about interoperability with Linux, or indeed pursuing a long term campaign to encourage questions like this one?
If you take competing (“vendor neutral”) technologies for example, do you see the same issues?
Skipping straight to the point, whereas I can see why large companies with complex security requirements, who are tied to Windows, might prefer Windows native file-sharing, for anyone else SSHFS might seem to be a MUCH better solution. I use it here (and have done for longer than I care to remember) and it’s quite happy working with Linux, Mac and Windows. It’s pretty much (comparatively) zero-config and generally just doesn’t go wrong. And let’s face it, it’s “ssh” so you get that nice fuzzy feeling inside knowing all your traffic is encrypted with your own keypair 
It’s supported natively on most Linux desktops and is integrated into various file explorers. For Windows there are a number of SSH solutions, but if you take a look at (for example) WINFSP, this integrates into the WIndows desktop and presents as just “another” transport for Windows file-sharing.
I tend to find that questions that begin “why doesn’t Linux …” or “why isn’t Linux …”, are often more effective when re-phrased; “what is it about Linux I’ve not spotted yet …” 
… but to return to the original point, when there are potentially “better” options available, there are limits to how much free time people will sink into … I’ll choose my words carefully … “tech that typically isn’t preferred on Unix OS’s”.
I found this Microsoft article which may help explain the situation from their perspective
& I’ll add that Samba is used by many enterprises/companies, so is considered suitable for production use.
There are other options you could look at too, FTP and Webdav being two of the obvious alternatives. And/or applications like SeaFile or Own/Next-Cloud could (briefly discussed in another post within this forum) provide both file integration and additional features.
hope this helps…
Hi I have no problems with Linux systems but do think out of the box LAN networking between Linux computers should be standard.
But that is not the case wok is required to get a full operating LAN.
Linux should be looking at ways to ensure that connecting to win based boxes on a LAN is easy.
This is not saying that win ms should co the same.
I can think of better things to do with my time.
Ok, so LAN networking between Linux computers IS standard (out of the box) and you can set up SSHFS or NFS (or Samba) on a per-linux user basis very easily. (indeed there are a bunch of UI tools to assist with this)
Depending on your UI, KDE for example provides a “sharing” tab in the file manager which sets up file sharing via Samba and indeed walks you through installing Samba if it’s not installed - maybe try Ubuntu if Mint has a problem, not all Linux distributions are created equal …
Do you mean that you think interop between Linux/Samba and Windows should work out of the box?
Do you think it would be unfair to say that given the resources at M$'s disposal, if THEY wanted it to work out of the box … it would? If you’ve followed the various SAMBA related issues over the years, you might find that the reason it doesn’t - isn’t a Linux issue or deficiency (!)
If you google “ibm baystar microsoft” and “microsoft balmer linux cancer”, and have a read of some of the resulting links, the reasons behind the issues you’re seeing may become clearer. The new line that M$ is now “linux friendly”, yeah, maybe a pinch of salt.
