Ah, so perhap the original poster meant that linux doesn't have native
microsoft windows networking software? Quite understandable since unix
has always had nfs, but samba is a relative newcomer. However, out of
the box, linux distros can do ssh, scp, sftp, ftp, rsync etc, so
networking is definitely a strong point.

And as for the foreign protocols, even samba is not that hard to set up
- if not included in the default install, it's just an apt-get away, and
a suitable management interface makes it fairly straightforward for the
novice.

I've set up unix servers with samba and webmin to allow completely
non-technical people to manage samba shares even back in the 1990s.