> Poor File and Folder Sharing Situation on the Local Network -> really not an issue, we have smb ftp ntfs...

I have been mucking around with Windows lately, and two things that caught me off-guard was the difference in file sharing and remote desktop between the two platforms. Unix and, by extension, Linux grew up in networked environments. I was really expecting it to be better than Windows.

Consider NFS. It's plenty fast, in the blows the socks off of SMB sense. It mounts as a regular file system, so it gets along with every Unix application. Is it appropriate outside of a local network? Nope. About the only way access control will work properly is to centralize account management, either on a server or by manually matching up the UID/GID on each system. Not only is that more work, but I really have to wonder about the security implications of that. Samba is also a pain to setup on Linux, at least if you're not running one of the big desktop environments. Protocols like FTP aren't really meant for file or folder sharing. I suppose you can wrap them up as a FUSE file system. Otherwise you aren't going to be accessing files from applications remotely, unless they built in support for those protocols.

The thing that really blew my mind though was Remote Desktop. Click a checkbox to enable it on Windows (Professional), select any users who you want to have access, head over to another computer, and log in with your account. Video works. Audio works. It isn't doing anything funky, like VNC, where the gate-keeping is managed by a single password.

Don't get me wrong. I'm firmly in the camp that most of the weaknesses (and lack of strengths) that people see in either Linux or Windows is mostly about familiarity. Having used Linux almost exclusively for a quarter century, I can certainly attest to that. I can count the strengths of Windows on the fingers of one hand (IMHO) and using it is a battle to maintain my sanity.

I also don't see a lot of the issues people cite, such as local file sharing (or remote desktop), as being something that affects most users. For personal use, most people have shifted to online services. For large institutions, there are professionals to manage the quirks of either operating system. That pretty much leaves small businesses and enthusiasts. Other issues are truly issues, but they are impossible to resolve without throwing away the advantages of Linux (like the claims of there being too many distributions).

I think the go-to for sharing users is not to manually sync UID/GID, but to just connect it to a database. For example you can install libpam-mysql add your database credentials and be done.

For remote access I think ssh -X works? Not sure it will work with Wayland, but I am not a fan of that anyways.

I'm just dealing with a couple of personal computers, so it was far easier to manually sync the UID/GID. But yes, if you're dealing with a network with many users you will want to find another approach.

`ssh -X` will work for some X applications. Heck, if you're connections are between two computers on a LAN and you don't care much about security, you can just make sure `DISPLAY` is set and open up X with "xhosts +". Tunnelling through `ssh` is useful when you're going across a public network, trying to get into a private network (heck, I've used ssh tunnelling for Remote Desktop between Windows machines in this case), or need a secure connection for any number of other reasons. A couple of caveats though, not all X applications will work this way and you have to redirect audio yourself. This would actually be my preferred approach since it involves displaying an application remotely, rather than an entire session. That said, there are too many caveats these days. Thirty years ago though, it was great!

Windows NT did as well grew up in network environments, it has been a while that it became a consumer OS with Windows XP.

linux has far better hardware support than windows

Especially for weird and obscure peripherals. Good chance you can plug something into a linux machine and it'll detect it and just work because someone way smarter than me also owns that device and got a driver for it mainlined into the kernel.

On the Windows side of things, you can run into situations where you have really old specialized devices where the manufacturer is long gone, so the driver downloads don't exist anymore.

Which doesn't guarantee there is some source code lying around that will work in the always breaking Linux kernel driver APIs, and if the user is not a coder, or unable to find someone that will bother to do the needfull for them, the outcome is hardly different.

there are few garantuees in life. The drivers in the linux kernel work, as they are maintained with API changes. If some dont, you can report bugs that will be looked at.

Also no garantuees that there isnt bugs in windows drivers. Good luck reporting bugs to same level

I have had as much luck with enough Linux drivers, using Linux since 1995.

Including distributions killing drivers, because "no one uses them".

or the driver comes with background apps implemented in electron requiring gigabytes of ram to just operate simple things.

Office works like a charm if you install Chrome. That's a whole other can of worms though.