Apparently, inspecting the logs, I found that this causes the issue...
io.netty.util.IllegalReferenceCountException
This happens to the "server side" where I start the LAN world, and as far as I understood, this is an error occurring when encoding the packets to send to the other clients... meanwhile in the other pc, where my brother would join my minecraft world from, it doesn't have any error listed in the logs...
I couldn't find any debug.log files in neither of the pc though, maybe this version of minecraft doesn't generate them (?)