@aburka @spacelizard I doubt if many other people have either. The tar format was not used with analogue compact cassettes, which were the storage format of choice for cheap '80s 8-bit microcomputers. I bet someone on here will know of an exception though!

@quixoticgeek @aral @ammdias @iaruffell Ideally you never want to reuse a user ID when someone leaves, because it might be in use somewhere as a file ownership. And there are reasons you might want to generate temporary/transient users frequently. So you don't ever need anywhere near 260 million users to run into trouble. Unfortunately Windows seems to have the edge here, with its bulky SIDs.

@quixoticgeek @aral @ammdias @iaruffell No but you need to have a way of mapping your "enterprise" user ID space (from LDAP or AD or wherever) to a local user ID for every user that logs in. The smaller the local UID space is, the trickier this becomes. It's a bit like having to map every IPv6 address to an IPv4 address.
I expect Linux will one day try to support 128 bit UIDs natively.

@AnnaAnthro First world solutions to first world problems.

@quixoticgeek @aral @ammdias @iaruffell It's more like 260 million, if you fit into the gaps left between systemd's UID land grab.
There are various reasons, though, why it is desirable for an ID space like this to be sparse. So it isn't very much.
https://systemd.io/UIDS-GIDS/

@wisegreyowl One of the best sections of the wall.

@pikesley @tante I thought it was a trilogy TBH, obvs I missed the last one.