So I'm trying to get a small home network going, which I have but thru Samba. But it hit me that Samba is supposedly for networking to Windows machines right? It works and all but clicking extra stuff to get into workgroups that I believe Linux doesn't even need seems stupid. What is the correct way to share files? I've got all Linux machines in my house.

Kind of depends on the distro you have and maybe how complex you want it to get. There are hundreds of ways to provide some remote resource. Things that come to mind off hand would be NFS, FTP, TFTP, HTTPS server (barracuda server) as well as SSH and more. Things like messengers and remote desktops can share files and desktop.

Some distro's offer some easy ways to manage and access remote files.

NFS. The only concern is NFS goes by UID's, not user names. So if you have user snatale1 with UID 500 in one box and with UID 1000 in another you will not have correct permissions. There are several ways to get around this, IMHO for small networks it is best to synchronize the UID's.

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Thanks guys, I looked up some NFS configs and maybe a little above me for now, guess I'll stick with Samba for now and play around with NFS in a VM until I'm confident in switching over my setup. Thanks.

Might see this too. This company has been around for a long time and has supported linux. https://barracudadrive.com/

If you use KDE just start dophin and click on the network icon. You'll have to enter the IP-adress and password of the machine and account you want to contact, the rest is cared for...

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This thread is marked as [SOLVED]. What is the solution?

The solution is....
That the OP continues to use samba/cifs and will look at NFS maybe in future.

Staying with this is no true solution (at least for me), that's why I asked, but if the OP is content...

If you feel you need help with such a situation then maybe consider a new thread on your issue. It will receive more attention that way I think.

In actuality NFS is real easy.

Do some googling on setting up NFS
NFS is the way to go, very easy to mount remote destination as local destinations such as: mount -t nfs homeserver:/var2/ /mnt/nfs/- this will make the directory "/mnt/nfs" representative of the /var2/ directory on the remote server.
some of files of interest are: /etc/exports , /etc/mtab , /etc/fstab , /etc/hosts

If you don't require Active Directory, you don't require all of SAMBA but just to use the CIFS file system (NTFS) you can still use SAMBA. I have used SAMBA for as long as I've been connecting Linux computers to my network. First it was without Active Directory but then I had to go through the extra steps of logging into each resource and selecting to remember the password. Weather on Windows or by using SAMBA Active Directory, Active Directory provides a common database for authentication so that once you get everything set up your desktop login also works for shared resources, such as folders and files and printers.

I switched over to SAMBA4 Active Directory when I switched my email from Exchange Server to SOGo. Since that time, SAMBA4 has become better and I've been quite satisfied with it.

One last possibility you may have is connecting a Linux computer to a Windows Active Directory. While there are several distro's out there that can join an Active Directory domain, most of them use products that require using the terminal and/or installing additional software, like PBIS. openSuSE is an exception. If you have enough knowledge to join a Windows AD from a Windows desktop computer you can do the same in openSuSE.