Don’t try to tell me that it’s all so easy now, I literally just went through hours of research and experimenting and samba settings and changing my disk’s fstab file just to get a folder to show up on my home network.

For most people, it is (and has been) that easy. If it works as intended, you can simply open your desktop explorer thing, click on network and have it show up. I know that because that has been my experience a couple of years ago and I was surprised at it just working so flawlessly. To be clear, I’m not denying your issues, I’m just pointing out that your experience is not automatically the average experience.

Of course there can be bugs and other issues which require troubleshooting, but that’s not specifically a linux issue.

The difference is that for non-techies, it’s harder to troubleshoot because advice you find is mostly written for techies, there is less info and there are a lot of different linux based operating systems.

For techies, it’s generally easier to troubleshoot because you can get more info out of the system (if you know how) and you generally have more power over the system.

but pretending it’s all smooth sailing and so easy and polished is misleading.

I agree, you cannot generalize a personal experience and then universally apply it to every person as well as every linux based distribution, like “it’ll work flawlessly out of the box because that’s been my experience”. You also cannot generalize it over every linux based system. I have tried a lot of different distros with different hardware and my experience has varied a lot. I have had issues and bugs with ubuntu that just didn’t happen with arch based distros.

But again, it’s virtually never smooth sailing for everyone in every case. Windows users have to troubleshoot issues and bugs too.