To amplify RedWeasel’s very good answer, fstab runs as root and unless you specify otherwise, the share will mount with root as the owner on the local machine. From the perspective of the Samba server, it’s the Jellyfin user accessing the files, but on the local machine, but local permissions come into play as well. That’s why you can get at the files when you connect to the share from Dolphin in your KDE system—it’s your own user that’s mounting the share locally.

This is a pretty routine workflow for me too. VNC works okay, but there’s some special sauce in the macOS implementation that make it much more responsive Mac to Mac. For Linux to Mac, I waffle between NoMachine and Parsec. Lately I’ve been leaning toward Parsec and it’s a pretty usable experience.

How about an alternate route? If transferring information between computers is the goal, you could skip the external drive altogether and put syncthing on both machines. Then you could just share the appropriate directories between the two without the go-between.

I think it’s just a matter of getting used to it. I had the same issue at first and the more I used the command line, the more I started to prefer it to GUI apps for certain tasks.

A couple things that I use all the time:

• tab completion is incredible
• cd - goes back to the last directory you were in (useful for bouncing back and forth between locations)
• !$ means the last argument. So if you ls ~/Downloads and then decide you want to go there, you can cd !$.
• :h removes the last piece of a path. So I can do vim /etc/network/interfaces and then cd !$:h will take me to /etc/network.

Another option that’s pretty much perfect as long as you don’t need to provide remote support for macs is Remotely (https://github.com/immense/Remotely). You can selfhost it and it works kind of like teamviewer, so pretty simple from the client standpoint.

I think what you’re describing can be accomplished with docker-compose’s depends_on option. I’m not certain how it works across compose files, but that would be the first place I’d look.