crossposting here what i just wrote on the overlapping topic – is that bad? The default File Sharing and Media Sharing experience in 18.04
definitely don’t remove the samba sharing integrated into nautilus as @dalaa suggests! i agree it should be added to the sharing settings pane (the output of net usershare info, which shows in one place everything that’s being shared) is sorely needed, and that would be a good place for it. but the discoverability of how to share something over the network in nautilus is critical! it can be both. it is definitely not a good idea to require that to share something, you have to go somewhere else to talk about it, rather than operating on it directly.
the interoperability with other OS’s is critical – i use it to move files between heterogeneous machines all the time. it’s really hard for me to fathom that people in this thread are wondering whether people do this a lot.
i’m curious why @dalaa says webdav is default? as far as i know, it only shows up when you install gnome-user-share, and then it can only share one predetermined folder (~/Public/). how is that default, compared to nautilus-share (samba) which is installed by default and can share anything? in any case, again, it doesn’t have to be one or the other, it can be both. why not have both interfaces initiate both protocols? that way, clients will have more chances of easily connecting with what they already have or are familiar with.
the samba password thing is in urgent need of fixing – i just spent all day trying to figure this out, that’s how i wound up here. an easy fix is that when someone unchecks the guest box, just check whether the current known users are in sync with samba. if not, launch a dialog asking for their password explaining that it’s required to set up password protected sharing, and that clients should connect with their usernames/passwords on the system. if they agree, it automatically executes “sudo smbpasswd -a username” for all known users. i guess from then on a service will have to continuously run to make sure that account changes from the UI or CLI are kept in sync with the samba users. i don’t know linux well enough yet to know its general approach to keeping UI and text config files in sync, that seems to be the core of the issue.