How to change the username of my system

[MaiseyEllie]

How do I change the username of my QubesOS. Is it possible to do so?

[tannerlambert]

assuming you mean that you want to change the username in dom0, you can, but I would not recommend to do so. The default username “user” is the same accross all templates, and hence appVMs (and therefore dispVMs). I’m not sure if it is hardcoded somewhere.

dom0: sudo usermod -l newuser -d /home/newuser -m user

I’m reasonably sure that this will break things though. I wouldn’t recommend it.

[gonzalo-bulnes]

Moderation note: I moved this topic to the User support category.

@MaiseyEllie Welcome to the forum! The Community Guides category is used when you want to share a tutorial or a guide, when asking a question, posting in the User support category is best, and it also allows you to mark one of the answers as the solution, which is a great way to thank the person who helped you, and to make that solution easier to find for anyone who’s got the same question!

The “mark as solution” button can be found in the bottom section of the posts.

[solene]

If you want to change the username in dom0, I wrote a guide explaining how to proceed:

**RESOLVED**How to change incorrectly spelled username for new instalation

I got it give your root user a password reboot when choosing Qubes OS boot in grub, type e to edit in the “module2” line, add single and press ctrl+x to boot enter LUKS password as requested enter root password as requested type usermod -l newlogin oldlogin type exit done Basically, you can also do it live but it’s dirty sudo -i vipw and replace your username with the new one vipw -s and replace username modify /etc/group, /etc/subgid and /etc/gshadow to replace the old usern…

[XMachina]

It is hardcoded in some salt files for sure. I’m not sure about anyhting else.

To be clear, I think it isn’t hardcoded in a way that will break anything, but my username is user, so I’m not sure.

[nokke]

Back up dom0 before trying it.

If you’ve configured your desktop at all, changing the username will break many settings in your home directory. With a bit of care, you can sort this out with find, sed, and then restart the desktop environment.