"The less you need to rely on any proprietary protocol to get work done, the better off you are overall. Some of those protocols have been real stumbling blocks--such as SMB, Microsoft's proprietary protocol for file and printer sharing. Linux implementations of SMB exist, but you're probably better off without it in the long run whenever you can manage it.
"I recently set up a Linux workstation that shared out a Hewlett-Packard printer to the rest of my network -- a network that otherwise consisted entirely of Windows machines..."
