I'm almost completely new to networking and fairly ignorant about it, because we've had a router in my house giving us internet access for twelve years but have never really exploited the possibilities of networking in any other way. I'm interested, though.

But my specific question is: Why don't I have a "public" folder whose files can be accessed by other computers in the house? Once or twice, I fooled around with using the shared folder in my user account, after I learned that files put into it could be accesses on the other computers; if I recall, it was labeled "public." For the first time in many years I own more than one computer, and I would like to share files freely between them. I wanted to start with putting files in the "public" folder before I did anything else, because that's about the only networking I know how to do. But it's not there anymore: my user account does not contain a "public" folder, and the distro doesn't make one in new accounts--I checked. Why not? Does Linux not use this method of sharing files anymore?

I have no idea if the issue is anything specific to my distro (MX 14). I hardly know what I'm doing on the subject of networking yet. But the system doesn't clearly seem prepared to share anything with other computers. I can't even figure out how to make files shared with or without the "public" folder. I right-click on them and there's no such option. I vaguely remember seeing that the last time I casually fooled around with sharing some files, years ago.

I guess it's mainly a curiosity, since I'm teaching myself how to use Samba.

Your distro probably does not create a public folder by default, leaving you to do it manually. Public folders are created in the Ubuntu derivatives by default.

As far as basic networking your machines, you'll probably want to install the Samba packages for your distro (from whatever package manager you use). You'll also want to use a Samba plug-in for your file manager (KDE's dolphin file manager does this well). Then, it's only a series of right clicks, tabs and menu selections to set up a SMB share in a folder you choose (go ahead and create one called Public, if you prefer).

Samba has the benefit of being available in all major OSes (somewhat of a problem to get working in Win 7, but Win 8.1 works just fine).

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Yeah, I'm in the process of learning Samba.