Having consistency of UID and GID on UNIX is extremely important if you have multiple servers and clients that you want to maintain a consistent identity on. Be it for NFS, Git, or any other administrative task. Having the same IDs for your users across different computers really helps.
Sadly, almost no OS install utilities allow you to specify the UID/GID of the default user that's created during setup, which means we have to do this afterward, thus this tutorial exists to give me and everyone a clear path to UID consistency.
I almost always run Debian on my Linux machines, thus I can't say this is the right way of doing it in other distros, I can't see why it wouldn't apply to others as well.
# Ensure no processes are running from the old user. pkill -U $OLD_UID # Change UID/GID using usermod. usermod -u $NEW_UID -g $NEW_GID $USERNAME # Fix file permissions to use the new UID. find / -uid $OLD_UID -exec chown -h $NEW_UID {} + find / -gid $OLD_UID -exec chgrp -h $NEW_GID {} +
If you're using a Raspberry Pi with its graphical desktop environment, you should use raspi-config to disable booting straight to X.