Re: did Microsoft kill it's cash cow?
>the equivalent of persistently assigning a drive letter to a NAS share, which in Windows takes about 30s, in Ubuntu would involve plenty of Googling, firing up the good old terminal, editing fstab, ...).
Maybe you should run Suse... ;)
Yast->Network Services->NFS Client
or from the file browser, click on "Network->Samba Shares->(workgroup/domain)->Server->(share)
Admittedly, there is still work to be done. KDE (& probably Gnome) should push their file system configs down to the OS.