Today’s update included Samba. I thought Samba was not installed by default in Neon. Taking a peak with Synaptic, I see a few plugins and app specific Samba packages, which is fine, but I also see samba-common, samba-libs, and samba-common-bin are installed, but the package “Samba” is not.
I do not see a service for samba running. Are these packages just there for dep compatibility reasons, or is samba actually installed but not running? Can they be removed?
Probably read the package descriptions, to get an idea of what they are?
But this is normal Debian/Ubuntu package naming and compartmentalization, and often makes little sense at first to us mere mortals down here 
The package samba is the server (which is not installed by default), with the client being the package smblient. The other packages (which you DO have by default, along with smbclient) are common packages shared between both.
You will find these or similar client packages on most every distro, since they allow file managers and other applications to access smb shares. Ubuntu, most variants, and probably Debian have the exact ones installed that you see on your system.
You probably can remove them, but they may be tied in with other system packages. I don’t believe any services are running for the client, but I could be wrong.
Thanks Claydoh. I will leave them alone.