How does that philosophy come from Windows? Windows was all about tying your application directly to the host OS via the old .net framework and COM. You had to wait for the OS to update before your app could, or the OS could randomly update and break your app
Containers as a technology are almost entirely a Linux thing as well, Windows ships with a full Linux kernel to support it now.
Don’t let lack of knowledge ever be the reason to stop trying something in homelabs! Honestly for a beginner resource ChatGPT is where I’d go for these kinds of questions. It does a great job explaining what all the terms mean and you can drill down into topics as needed such as permissions and different terminal commands you’ll need
Anyways, this link has a decent description of samba:
https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-and-configure-samba#1-overview
So as long as a computer is on the network it could access files stored on this hard drive. It is super useful as a first homelab project