| > This required installing support for NTFS What distro were you using? Most ship with NTFS support last I checked (though perhaps there's a higher concentration of distros without NTFS support for the RPi). Similarly: why even use NTFS in the first place if you're doing a network share? Samba can serve files from an ext4-formatted volume to a Windows client just fine. Unless you were planning on being able to remove the drive and plug it into a Windows machine directly, there's no need to use NTFS at all. > Every step needed to be researched through a mixture of blog posts, Wikis and other online resources. This is true of a lot of things, no matter which operating system one uses. Remember that Samba is designed for enterprise environments. Setting up a fileshare in such an environment with Windows is typically just as complicated (but involving a lot of graphical wizards instead of configuration file editing), since there's a lot more involved than just right-clicking the drive letter and telling Windows to broadcast it on the network. You're right that the process for sharing files over a network with Windows hosts ought to be made more accessible for home users. Linux doesn't really have a "Homegroup" equivalent, which is unfortunate. |
That's exactly what I was planning. Also, the drive already had data on it that was supposed to be shared.
I did not intend to start a Linux-Windows flame war, I merely pointed out that for the majority of people buying a Raspberry Pi 2 for the purpose of using it for other things that learning Linux, Windows will be an acceptable choice and in a lot of circumstances probably get out of their way more than Linux. On the other hand, I don't know how you would use the GPIO pins in Windows, but that's easy in Linux. It depends on what you're doing and what you're used to.