Years ago when I first installed Linux, /etc/login.defs set **UID_MIN** to **500**, so I ended up with a user ID close to that. But now the value is 1000, so every time I install a new system I have to be careful to specify my existing user ID so I don't end up with **1000**. I've experienced difficulties interacting between networked PCs when my user had a different ID on the two machines (can't remember exactly what). So I'm careful to always keep them all the same. Is there any advantage to changing them all to a number above 1000? Why was it changed? Is there any software package that installs a system account user ID above 500 that might clash? I usually use Fedora Linux, though I've experimented with a number of others and this seems to be consistent across the field. (Reasonable tags for this question might be *user*, *uid*, *UID_MIN*, *etc* or *login.defs*, but alas, I'm not allowed to create any of them.)

Years ago when I first installed Linux, /etc/login.defs set **UID_MIN** to **500**, so I ended up with a user ID close to that. But now the value is 1000, so every time I install a new system I have to be careful to specify my existing user ID so I don't end up with **1000**. I've experienced difficulties interacting between networked PCs when my user had a different ID on the two machines (can't remember exactly what). So I'm careful to always keep them all the same. Is there any advantage to changing them all to a number above 1000? Why was it changed? Is there any software package that installs a system account user ID above 500 that might clash? I usually use Fedora Linux, though I've experimented with a number of others and this seems to be consistent across the field. (Reasonable tags for this question might be *user*, *uid*, *UID_MIN*, *etc* or *login.defs*, but alas, I'm not allowed to create any of them.)

Years ago when I first installed Linux, /etc/login.defs set **UID_MIN** to **500**, so I ended up with a user ID close to that. But now the value is 1000, so every time I install a new system I have to be careful to specify my existing user ID so I don't end up with **1000**. I've experienced difficulties interacting between networked PCs when my user had a different ID on the two machines (can't remember exactly what). So I'm careful to always keep them all the same. Is there any advantage to changing them all to a number above 1000? Why was it changed? Is there any software package that installs a system account user ID above 500 that might clash? I usually use Fedora Linux, though I've experimented with a number of others and this seems to be consistent across the field. (Reasonable tags for this question might be *user*, *uid*, *UID_MIN*, *etc* or *login.defs*, but alas, I'm not allowed to create any of them.)