In Linux environment there's a special user called root. This account has very broad privileges which means having full authority to manage the system. That's why it is not recommended to use this account on a regular basis.

So let's create a new user account that we will use to log in from now on. You can choose any name you like but in my case I'll call it laravel.

adduser laravel

You will get several questions starting with the password for the account that you want to create. You can enter a strong password, then you can optionally fill in some additional information such as Full Name, Room Number and others. You can simply hit ENTER to ignore the input.

You will have a confirmation message confirming about the information that you have entered. Hit Y and press enter to proceed.

Now, we have a new user with normal or regular account privileges. However, when we login with regular account we may sometimes need to do administrative stuff.

What we might do is to log out as regular user and log back in as the root user. Or we might be log in as a regular user in one terminal and login as root user in another terminal at the same time.

To avoid that, we can apply the root privileges to our regular user account. This will allows that user to be able to execute commands with administrative rights by adding sudo in front of each command.

Head over to your terminal and type this command:

usermod -aG sudo laravel

This command esentially add the laravel user to the sudo group which will allow the user to use the sudo command.

Now to test our new user, let's logout from our remote server by typing exit. Then log back in with new user account.

ssh laravel@ipaddress

Once you've logged in you'll find a welcome message as you found when login as root account. However you'll see the account user's name on the Terminal prompt.