Lucky

Don’t let lack of knowledge ever be the reason to stop trying something in homelabs! Honestly for a beginner resource ChatGPT is where I’d go for these kinds of questions. It does a great job explaining what all the terms mean and you can drill down into topics as needed such as permissions and different terminal commands you’ll need

Anyways, this link has a decent description of samba:

https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-and-configure-samba#1-overview

A Samba file server enables file sharing across different operating systems over a network. It lets you access your desktop files from a laptop and share files with Windows and macOS users.

So as long as a computer is on the network it could access files stored on this hard drive. It is super useful as a first homelab project

How does that philosophy come from Windows? Windows was all about tying your application directly to the host OS via the old .net framework and COM. You had to wait for the OS to update before your app could, or the OS could randomly update and break your app

Containers as a technology are almost entirely a Linux thing as well, Windows ships with a full Linux kernel to support it now.

Microsoft develops vscode as open source, but compiles it with proprietary telemetry tooling.

VSCodium compiles from the same source code but without the telemetry