One of the first things you should do when setting up the Raspberry Pi is to change the default password for the pi user. Personally, I would rather just delete the user altogether and create my own user. So here’s how I deleted the Pi user on Raspberry Pi.
Step 1: Create a New User
Before you begin, make sure that you can SSH into your Raspberry Pi . I first began by creating a new user on the Raspberry Pi. To do so, I entered the following command:
sudo adduser dave
It will prompt you to create a password and fill in other account information. Next, I went ahead and added this new user to the sudo group. This is so that I can use the sudo command in this account.
sudo usermod -aG sudo dave
The -a parameter tells the usermod to append to the given group (-G) which we specified as sudo.
Step 2: Delete Pi User
For some reason, deleting the Pi user was more of a challenge than I wanted it to be. To delete the Pi user on Raspberry Pi, there are a couple of steps you’re going to need to get through. First, change the autologin in the display manager. Type in the following:
sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
Then navigate down to where you see autologin-user and change it to the username that you want. Remember, in the nano text-editor you can use CRTL + O to save. Now we need to do the same thing in the raspberry config. Type in the following:
raspberry-config
You will see a window appear. Go to boot-options and the CLI sub menu. From there, I changed the option to require login on boot and not autologin.
Finally, once you are ready reboot your raspberry pi:
sudo reboot
Now login to your Pi using the new user. Then run the following command to officially delete the Pi user:
sudo userdel -r pi
That’s it! That’s how I went about deleting the pi user on Raspberry Pi.