Everything in the article seems misplaced or mispoken. GNOME Nautilus, click on network, if a server exists it shows up, you click it and login to the share (same as Windows except you don't have to assign a drive letter), and options asks of you want to remember user name and password. Done. Or you type smb://host/share.
Seems easier than Windows non GUI of: net use D: \host\share /USER:username password.
And when I was new to Linux GNOME Disks just made perfect sense to me. Select a drive, format it, partition it, add a relevant filesystem.
The whole article is a guy complaint it doesn't work like he thinks it should because he knew windows way first.