My transition to Linux has been mostly smooth so far, but I do find myself occasionally missing some Windows “exclusive” features. One of these has to be fingerprint login, which technically works on Linux — assuming you have the magical combination of vendor and developer support.
Even then, it is a pain to set up. And to be honest, I’ve always been indifferent to it until I experienced something a bit more convenient, which would be Windows Hello. It’s incredibly fast, reliable, and is now bundled into a lot of Windows laptops these days.
Imagine my disappointment when I found out that I would lose this functionality when switching over to Linux. Or so I thought. Turns out, there’s a free Linux application that brings the same Windows Hello functionality, with both screen unlocking and authentication as configurable options.
I turned off one background service and my Linux machine finally felt fast
Your Linux machine might just be loading pointless services every time it boots
Installing Howdy
The AUR can be complicated
Before we get to installing the package, what exactly is Howdy? In a nutshell, it’s an authenticator app for Linux that makes use of facial recognition to authenticate parts of the Linux desktop, such as the lock screen.
Howdy makes use of the IR emitters and cameras on your laptop to verify whether it’s really you. It’s essentially Windows Hello and works out pretty well in practice, although it has similar quirks. Since it uses IR cameras, Howdy can work in complete darkness, which is a really convenient feature.
Going back to the installation, it was a bit tricky. There are multiple Howdy packages in the AUR, but the only one that worked reliably enough for me was howdy-git.
Howdy pulls in a lot of dependencies and takes a while to install, so you might have to wait for it to finish.
After an agonizing few minutes, Howdy was finally installed onto my laptop, but there was still some configuration left to be done.
Using the AUR helper Paru, I was able to get Howdy installed within a few minutes. Howdy-bin flat out refused to work properly once installed, so I settled for the more updated git version, which worked without issues.
Configuring Howdy to work with screen lockers
A bit of a hassle
Howdy does not work out of the box. You’ll need to set it up first, and the Arch Linux Wiki has a pretty comprehensive guide on this. Since I was using the beta version of Howdy, I had to slightly tweak the authenticator command.
auth sufficient /lib/security/pam_howdy.soThis line has to be added to the requisite configuration file under /etc/pam.d/ for Howdy to work. You’ll generally be looking for your screen locker (for me, it was swaylock) file.
Paste the command below the “auth include login” text and save the file. You should now be good to go, with Howdy triggering as soon as you restart the app.
If you’re on the regular (non-git) version of Howdy, the command differs slightly.
auth sufficient pam_python.so /lib/security/howdy/pam.py
Testing it out
Some minor quirks
Of course, Howdy needs to register a face in order to work. Before that, I had to make a few tweaks to the configuration file. The device path had to be filled out, which in my case was /dev/video0. Running a simple command lists all the video devices on your computer, and you’ll have to single out the IR camera from the list.
v4l2-ctl --list-devicesYou’ll need v4l-utils from the AUR for this, or any similar package in your Linux distro of choice.
Finally, I disabled snapshots entirely. Snapshots of your facial recognitions can take up a lot of space over time, so it’s best to leave this disabled.
With everything done and out of the way, it was finally time to add a face to Howdy. After running the correct command, all I had to do was stare into the camera for it to register my face, which was surprisingly quick.
sudo howdy add
sudo howdy testOne reboot later, and I had Windows Hello-like screen unlock working on my Linux installation.
Do not use this for root access
Howdy doesn’t limit you to just screen lockers. You can absolutely use it wherever you need an authentication tool, including the display manager (for login) and just about any PolKit app that prompts for a sudo password.
That being said, it’s probably not a good idea. Manually typing in your password is something that should not be discouraged, and Howdy is not a replacement for proper password security.
Which is why I’ve limited it to swaylock, for now.
