Running Debian Jessie 8.2.

I just setup my \home\<user name> folder for sharing by manually configuring the smb.conf file. This was after a considerable amount of time trying to figure out how to share a folder using properties->share from dolphin, but to no avail.

Can someone please ELI5 how kdenetwork-filesharing works? I'm hoping a bird's eye understanding will help me figure out what I'm doing wrong. I've read the Arch page on networking, and my limited understanding is telling me that dolphin is trying to write something to var/lib/samba/usershare. When I run dolphin from the command line, I can see an error that the path isn't found or it can't write to the path or something along those lines. Part of my confusion is that there already exists a folder in var/lib/samba/ called usershares (with an 's'), but the error (I think) is looking for usershare (s), and the Arch Linux man page also mentions usershare (s). From browsing the interweb, it seems like I have to make sure the path is there (s or s I'm not sure), and give sambashare permission to modify it, and add my username to the group sambashare. Then I have to setup the usershare(s or s) as a public folder in smb.conf. I tried all those things, and while Dolphin no longer displays a write error, my shares are still not persistent (they are erased as soon as I close Dolphin). I'm thinking this means that I've narrowed the problem down to the smb.conf file, but I'm not 100% sure of that. Additionally, I'm not sure how the smb.conf file should be setup as it relates to the usershare folder, if that's even what I'm supposed to be doing.

This is why I'm looking for a high level explanation. Perhaps if I understood better how it's supposed to work, I could better solve the problem, as opposed to following a walk-thru step-by-step without understanding what the effects are.

All that said, I can totally understand why everyone seems to just modify smb.conf directly. If I have to edit the smb.conf directly just to enable the GUI, I might as well just edit the smb.conf directly and share the folders I want.

This is a late answer and I'm probably not smart enough to answer all your questions, but.....

I too could not get this to work (using Netrunner Rolling 15.11), even after following these instructions: http://forums.netrunner.com/showthread.php?tid=16059 (so I too, just edit the smb.conf file.

After several system updates since then, I happened to notice the share tab showing on the Dolphin properties, and it seems to work to set up shares (Yes, I deleted my shares in smb.conf and use the dolphin share tab!)

Either it a bug got fixed in KDE/dolphin/samba or it was magic!

Note: I have the var/lib/samba/usershare folder without the "s"

Cheers