May I DELETE the initial ADMIN ACCOUNT after having created another admin User without risks?

Question

It's an old good Laptop running under a Ubuntu Mate version, which works fine, though the processor is only a dual core at a 2.2 GHz speed. Not used for video streaming because the proc would work at 100% constantly,not really a good idea. Otherwise FINE !

The man who installed this initially is gone, impossible to reach, and none knew the password of the only admin user. I guess it doesn’t matter too much... "super root user" allowing to do anything BUT I wasn't too sharp on Linux two days ago.
I had a first experience with Linux, because I had that lovely "Asus Eeepc" under Linux; I loved that Netbook, many years ago :)

So, I've been able to :

• Modify the password of that admin session
• Create another admin user
• The normal user of the PC is a friend of mine. she asked me to erase the account of that person My question is : May I DELETE this initial ADMIN ACCOUNT after having created another admin User without any risks for the system stability ? I guess I can but I’m not 100% certain

THANKS a lot for your help

Answer 1

You can use the command "groups" to verify that your admin account is in both the 'adm' and the 'sudo' groups. e.g.

tim@horton:~/devl$ groups
tim adm dialout cdrom floppy sudo audio dip video plugdev lxd netdev

If the admin account you want to use is in both 'adm' and 'sudo' groups, you can safely delete the old admin account.

It is a good idea to have a backup admin account, as heynnema suggests.