I just realized (kind of stupidly) that nautilus-share hasn't seen a release since 2011, so alternative graphical tools should be discussed.

Best if you close this, mate has decent samba support with caja-extensions and share-admin. It's kind of up to gnome if they want to maintain nautilus-share or gnome-user-share. I don't know of any maintained applications which provide a graphical tool for managing samba shares.

When Ikey talks about Solus as catering for the "home computing" market then providing the ability to share folders over the network by default becomes very relevant.

At the very least the Help Center should provide a "recipe" to achieve this functionality for normal users in the interim. "Won't fix" and "Samba is borked" just don't cut it.

I love Solus and admire the drive of the developers to make Solus better and understand the competition for limited resources. I however respectfully request that this bug deserves more consideration?

@joebonrichie :

We're looking into how we can best configure this to work out of the box without any user intervention (see T5180).

Ikey recently added some ancillary functionality to qol-assist such that users will by default become members of the system group 'users' (which now has a known gid) -- this is needed for setting up samba and setting up the relevant usershare directory containing configuration snippets (see R3820:191162d8f2db ).

In short: We're on it. =)

Documenting this here so it doesn't get lost:

# relevant smb.conf snippet

# Set up usershare functionality where users can set up shares themselves.
# The usershare path contains configuration snippets and is writable for
# members of the group 'users' by default (Solus-specific configuration).
# By default users can only edit their own shares (sticky bit is set on dir).
# Users can allow guest access to shares.
#
    usershare path = /var/lib/samba/usershare
    usershare max shares = 100
    usershare allow guests = yes
    usershare owner only = yes
    map to guest = Bad Password

# relevant samba.tmpfiles invocation for usershare functionality
d /var/lib/samba/usershare 1770 root 100 -

Note that qol-assist now sets up the users system group with gid=100 and adds human users to this group by default (per R3820:191162d8f2db + follow up commits)

This was added with R3946:db5c0aff179d .