[jeroenhd]

I remember doing something like this on Ubuntu recently. All I needed to do was right click a folder, hit properties, then share. Samba wasn't installed so there was a prompt that says "required software not installed, want to install it?" and after hitting yes and giving it my password it just worked.

I don't know if Ubuntu 22.04 changed this process or if your friend is using a less user friendly distro but I found this to be one of the easier things to do in Linux. You don't need to bother with smb.conf or whatever if your software ecosystem has built in SMB integrations (like they should, if they target the non-technically minded).

I do know that recent GNOME installs come with built in remote desktop over RDP which is a godsent. xrdp works great once you get it working but to do that you should be prepared to take the three hour deep dive into display/windows manager terminology, internals, and configuration files unless you're running a minimalist DE.

Really, common distros should have a button in the installer that says "install the software packages I'll probably need" to install all of this stuff and not rely on the user knowing what arbitrarily named packages they need. Let the purists disable that stuff if they want to, but let the normal people start out with a desktop that Just Works.