I can not answer the question on how the owner of chris’ home directory was changed from chris (1000) to 114. But I can make some general remarks that may help you with some understanding.
While you may see yourself as the “only user” of the sytem, that is only so seen from the human aspect. The system does not know any human people. it knows userids (numbers, and 1000 being one of them), that have a user name attached (chris attached to 1000, but also root attached to 0). All these userids are defind in /etc/passwd. When you look in this file, you will find not only root and chris, but at least a 20 more. So saying that the system has only one user is not true from the system’s point of view and that is the point of view we have to understand when we want to understand how the system functions.
You ask: “who is user 114”. You will now understand that you then have to look in /etc/passwd, where the second column (: separated) has the userid and the first the attached name. As said you will find entries beginning with:
root:0:
chris:1000:
But you will NOT find and entry with 114. I know that because then you would not have reported 114:users as owner, but the user name instead.
So chris’ home directory was, for whatever reason, owned by userid 114, which is not defined in /etc/passwd (and btw, thus unable to log in).
The permission of home directories are rwxr-xr-x by default.
The system administrator (using root) can change that on user creation (either by changing this so that all new created users get another setting, or setting it individual for a new created user).
The user, being ultimate responsible for protecting his/her data, can change that when wanted. E.g. to rwxr-x— when (s)he wants to block users outside the group users, or even to rwx------ to block all other users.
BTW, that is possible, because the parent directory of the user’s home directory (being /home) has the permissions:
henk@boven:~> ls -ld /home
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 17 jan 2014 /home
henk@boven:~>
and thus r-x for all users.
Thus if chris wants to set it to rwxr-xr-x or rwxr-x— is up to chris. If root wants to set it to any value on new user creation is up to root (IIRC this can be set up somewhere in YaST > Security and Users > Users and groups), but root must understand that the user can change that later.
And, if chris wants to set it to rwx-r-x— (or rwx------), he might also want to set an umask of 027 (or 077) to protect newly created files.
But as you say, chris is basically the only user ever to log in, one can ask how important such a protection is. OTOH, it does not harm also because there are no other users chris might want to allow access.
I hope this answer your secondary questions. No idea why the owner change to 114. Nor what is so special about userid 114.