>>Before I start linking computers together, I have couple of questions.
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>>Would I have any difficulty connecting Windows 7 and Windows 10 machines in peer to peer connection?
>>Also, does the fact that couple of computers are HOME versions and few f them are Professional version matter?
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>Good luck. You'll need it.
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>Trying to network windows boxes was troublesome from the beginning. In DOS days it was easy - you loaded any of third party networks (p2p things like Lantastic or RPTI) or designated one box as a server and loaded Novell and you were done. Novell was known to stay up for years.
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>Then came NetBEUI which was a horrible mess and couldn't connect more than four, because it was broadcasting the keep-alive signal too often, and that created too much noise. You could switch to TCP/IP, which worked most of the time, even under DOS 7 (which you got if you booted Windows 98 without win.exe). You perhaps had to set IP addresses manually, because it wouldn't decide which machine was the master browser (or it would, on several).
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>It sort of worked decently until the Vista. Then it went downhill. They started inventing new protocols on top of the old, cramming security in the most annoying way, inventing their own names for things everyone else called differently, redefined things... and now I have a situation where I got three boxes - one ubuntu machine hosting a W7 box, and a W7 laptop. The hosted W7 sees itself, the host and the router. Linux sees nothing until I navigate to a share on the laptop, then it lists both W7 machines but not the router. The laptop sees the hosted W7 and nothing else (after a refresh it sees itself too). And this is the stable configuration that I have now. A year ago, when I was installing ubuntu, just migrating things from one machine to another took me all day - actually finding a way to connect them took several hours. And then in the following months it happened several times that the only way to get something from one box to another was to put it on a thumb drive.
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>Sharing a printer? Gave up. Carry the printer over to where you need it, it's easier.
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>When you get it to work, at least, it keeps working. There were years when it would stop. The IP address would change from 192.168.0.x to 249.x.x.x something just by itself and wouldn't budge until a reboot. Then it would work fine for a few hours and then decide to switch again. Or it would just decide to close all the files I had open over the wire. Which was fine when they test it - you can save a word document, so the network works.
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>Etc etc... set rant stays on.

Hrm... curious. Didn't have much trouble when it came time for me to replace an aging Novell fileserver with a Linux box (distro used: openSUSE) with Samba. I did require a bit of planning to arrange the user groups so I could get the access permissions to work right. I did also have the occasional hiccup where I had to make a few relatively simple corrections at the console. Of course, I should probably heavily qualify "simple" -- it was simple because I was already familiar with Unix.
I did deploy a box using OpenMediaVault -- pretty easy to set up with the Web interface -- though I did have to resort to manually modifying the configuration files manually at the console to get the access rights to work the way I wanted.