When on my local network, I'm at the point regardless of OS (Win, Linux, Mac alike) where I tend to fire up the Python built-in http.server module on whichever machine I want to share from and go to the other to download whatever files I need.

I have never gotten inter-OS file sharing like SMB/Samba to work right other than using rsync or scp. And the only intra-OS file sharing I've ever had a good experience with is Mac AirDrop.

> I have never gotten inter-OS file sharing like SMB/Samba to work right other than using rsync or scp

That's weird. I usually just fire up Samba and everything works pretty much as expected. Granted, I don't use GUI tools, but one of the examples in the default config file is pretty much what you need (share the homes, or something to that effect).

Windows and OS X come ready for both SMB and NFS, which is the bulk of experiences I encounter. Apple AirDrop has also been very useful.

Mounting remote file systems can be done easily in the GUI, as can sharing. Like any such software, it's going to have a learning curve.

I can't remember the last time I was on Linux and didn't have to start off by installing cifs-utils, and then hunting down instructions on writing an .smbcredentials file.

Windows also makes it (relatively) easy to administer file sharing if you're on a AD domain. All said and done, I personally use Unraid for my home NAS.

Windows makes it hard, when you need to have credentials from multiple domains and these domains do not have configured trust. It's a hell then.

Both macs and linux can handle this fine.

Yeah using samba is just as hard on Linux. I've struggled to get AD to work correctly with older PC's. We run CNCs with Win 98.

NFS is simpler and easier to manage.

Windows 98 does not support AD out of the box; the contemporary solution was NT4 domain.

There is a solution for that, dsclient, but it is still missing Kerberos support, so you have to account for that.