I'd like it noted I'm an absolute Linux noob here.
Yesterday I had issues with Nvidia, which was fixed by switching to Pop!OS which worked swimmingly. Fedora failed at this spectacularly, Nobara, their Nvidia specific version, spectacularly so.
I also had issues with mounting a samba share. I have an asus router that's capable of hosting samba shares, but only in v1 of samba which as it turns out is disabled by default in Linux distros these days. Windows too but the fix for that is easier, just install the package. Anyways. I was able to get a temp fix going by enabling guest login and disabling the users server side, which was unsatisfying and only allowed me read access.
After following dozens of tutorials and reinstalling Pop!OS to clear my shenannigans I found a forum that had this listed.
client NTLMv2 auth = no
client use spnego = no
client min protocol = CORE
client max protocol = NT1
Post that under smb.conf (under workgroup=WORKGROUP... yes it matters) and it disables all versions of samba except for v1, which works for me since this is the only share I care about.
So now, I can log into my samba share, and I have full read write access, yay.
But I still couldn't figure out how to permanently mount this NAS, boo. I found some topics discussing adding a line to fstab to get it to mount on boot. After a few hours of poking I realized cifs was indeed not installed on PopOS! so the tutorial I was following was right, but still wrong.
After that I was at least getting an error, which referred me to mount.cifs(8) - Linux man page, which I'm pretty sure by arriving at that means I'm now a man.
//192.168.1.1/vault /media/alexandria cifs vers=1.0,_netdev,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777,nofail,username=phanlix,password=******* 0 0
Was the final syntax to get the ball rolling, yes I know I should do a credentials file and link that, get off my back mom.
And finally... my samba v1 file share is mounted within Linux.... and there was much rejoicing, yay.
Anyways half the reason I made this post is so I can search it later if I ever need to do this godforsaken task again, as exactly zero of this was intuitive or easy. In fact, all of this could have been avoided if whoever wrote this decided not to baby me and left V1 protocols intact, despite the security risk. The fact is all these package still have V1 in them, they're just disabled by a really really in depth process, and reenabling them was... a pain in the rear.
I still am having another issue. I have a local external harddrive that's connected via USB. I got that mounted fine through Disk and changing the settings there, which automatically updates fstab for you (thanks to whomever made that user friendly at least). However, steam will NOT point to that drive no matter what I do, chmod 777 is already in play. Weirdly, I was able to manually add it through the steam console commands, but that seemed to start it's own instance of steam, and none of the changes saved, the drive was working great and installed a few games fine, but on reboot or even just closing and reopening steam it's disassociating.
So gotta say, so far, I do NOT love drive management in Linux. I guess shame on me for using something semi-obscure, but Christ. I literally have been working on this all day since I got up at 10am. User friendly this is not.
Christ, I'm sure I'll care more about that sort of thing if I do get more into this. I know there's a firmware replacement for my asus router that's supposed to give better file sharing options, but I'm sketchy about firmware updates. I've had a few go bad over my lifetime and I don't want to replace a router that's that expensive right now.
So... I just fixed my external hdd issue, in the weirdest way possible.
I found how to access steam console here. It also had a line for manually adding a mounted drive through the console. That worked fine. Then I restarted and reopened steam and the drive wasn't there. So I exited and opened steam console again, and boom there it was. So I went into settings and told the steam console version to start on boot and that actually worked.
Looking at my apps though, searching for steam, there appear to be 2 separate installed versions of steam. Idk how that happened I'm very sure I only installed it once. I think somehow running the steam console literally created a second version of steam somehow. Idk though. It's working now so I'm not gonna analyze it too much.