Open Keyboard settings and add application/custom shortcuts:
Thunar file manager has the location/address shown as buttons. Use shortcut Ctrl+L to enable typing.
To move along GUI tabs, use Ctrl+PageUp/Down in Linux instead of Ctrl+(Shift)+Tab in Windows.
To expand/contract GUI trees, use Shift+Left/Right instead of simply Left/Right in Windows
Most Linux come with Samba Client (smbclient) installed that allows you to access Windows shares, the Samba Server is typically not installed by default, therefore you will need to do more work to share Linux folders with Windows. Here are the tools for a more complete experience:
For some reason, after installing and uninstalling samba and smbclient a few times, Linux Mint stopped connecting to Windows computer (yet other SMB running MX linux can be accessed fine), despite this worked fine out of the box.
Turns out it’s this flaw (not in MX linux) that it cannot negotiate with newer SMB versions that might have been addressed but it can stuck being unable to negotiate with Windows 7 (it has SMB1 and SMB2 enabled) under certain conditions. After placing “client max protocol = NT1” in smb.conf and reboot, it worked, then I removed the line and reboot and it still worked afterwards. Weird!
Linux Mint 19 also does not resolve local hostnames from DNS right out of the box (also the live CD boot) because it came with systemd-resolve which does not handle local hostnames resolution right away.
Windows 10 cannot access network file shares of older Windows (7 and before) out of the box, and I’m not impressed that Microsoft let millions of users waste their productivity to figure it out.
The issue is caused by SMB negotiatons. Basically at the time of writing, there are 3 major versions of SMB:
| Windows 2000 / XP / 2003 | Windows 7 / 2008 | Windows 8 / 10 | |
| SMB v1 (No encryption) | Default | Default (for backward compatibility) | Need to turn on SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support |
| SMB v2 | X | Enable SMB2 in registry (for 2008) | Default (for backward compatibility) |
| SMB v3 | X | X | Default |
More accurately, this blog post provides the negotiation chart for up to Windows 8 (think of Windows 10 is the same for now).
Turn on SMB 1.0 in newer Windows (8, 10 and above):
The SMB v1 does not have encryption, therefore a security risk. Makes sense to disable it unless there’s a compelling reason (like obsolete industrial computer under tightly controlled network).
SMB v2 might need to be enabled by registry in Windows 2008 if not already done so:
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters SMB2 (DWORD): 1 for enable, 0 for disable
This web page tells you how to turn on/off each SMB version individually.
Trolls in the 1970s (sitcom “Mind your language”):
Trolls in the 2019 (Extravagant cars parade):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G60GgNTP8UE