this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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Biometric login. It is available to an extent through fprint on Linux but support is not there for all hardware and it isn't a very seamless experience to setup at the moment
Linux also has Howdy for facial recognition/“Windows Hello”
Biometrics authentication seems to me to be entirely useless. It's less secure and more easily spoofed than passwords, and if you need more security 2FA or a physical key (digital or otherwise) provide it. It would be nice to have the support I guess, but the tech itself just seems like a waste of money.
Setup right it’s a lot faster than passwords. So I guess it automatically wins vs more secure methods.
I didn’t write the rules of average human thought processes.
In KDE and I think GNOME the setup is fine. But there are no usb fingerprint readers that work with Linux, at least that you can buy.
The Windows Hello camera enumerates under Linux as just another webcam that activates the flashing LEDs when it turns on (I've found a number of neat uses for this, including having a ridiculously low gain IR camera that I can just use for whatever and have what would be a surprisingly good emulation of the Wii sensor bar for use with Dolphin if it weren't constantly flashing on and off), and there is software (Howdy) for using it to sign in. Unfortunately, signing in with your face of course precludes using your password for decryption, meaning that after you start some applications you'll be prompted to type your password anyway to unlock your system keyring, and perhaps more importanty SDDM isn't smart enough to interface with fprintd/howdy properly and doesn't even try to activate the biometric sensor until you type something in the password box.
(Also, hilariously, because of how I set it up initially to accept my face instead of a password for sudo, I couldn't configure it to check whether the terminal was remote, so when I ssh'd in and tried to sudo, it turned on the hello camera however far away that was and looked for my face, only prompting me for a password after facial rec timed out.)
I had to scroll this far for a legitimate answer?
These aren't Linux issues that Windows does better. It's just companies that decided their hardware shouldn't run by Linux.
So in other words, you can’t use it in Linux…
Absolutely correct.
I made almost that exact comment in this post. 🤣
You don't suppose the fingerprint thing is a standard API kind of thing though? That was my assumption.
Lol - I was parodying your comment, actually 🙂. Not sure if fingerprint is standard api, but I suspect there is some proprietary stuff going on.
In the end it's not about blaming Linux, it's about getting adoption to a critical mass where commercial entities can realize a business case to support. Then the ecosystem will thrive.
Linux (and BSD for router workload) absolutely owns the server world. Even MS let's you run SQL Server on Linux). The desktop isn't there yet wrt adoption, but it's growing. Things like fingerprint sensors are definitely in the desktop (closer to end user) world and if it's the business use case that is the area of most growth, as I suspect it is (in India, especially) then I think these sorts of modules have higher likelihood of being adopted.