Suprisingly long time ago I wrote a post about the sorry state of fingerprint authentication on KDE. This post could be summarized as “don’t even bother”. I gave up on this enterprise and actually the situation got even worse later as the fingerprint sensor of my next computer – Dell 7210 – was not even supported by Linux drivers and fprintd.
So after abandoning this topic for some time I got another shot at checking out the topic again very recently.
The hardware I’m using now is Thinkpad X13 Yoga Gen 2. As with my previous thinkpads the driver/fprintd support is good. You can enroll fingerprints and verify them without problems. However that itself does not make the sensor really useful.
I started with a clean install of Kubuntu 24.10 – the latest version to date. Recalling Nate Graham optimistic posts I was full of hope. After installation I went straight to User settings to see … no mention of fingeprints anywhere. Turns out fprintd was not installed so I fixed that. That helped a bit, however the UI is clearly broken and it’s not possible to enroll fingerprints.

Running “systemsettings” from the terminal I got some errors:
qrc:/kcm/kcm_users/FingerprintList.qml:22:15: QML Component: Cannot create delegate
qrc:/kcm/kcm_users/FingerprintList.qml:26:9: Required property friendlyName was not initialized
qrc:/kcm/kcm_users/FingerprintList.qml:25:9: Required property internalName was not initialized
Presumably I should be writing up a bug report instead of shouting into the void here but maybe I’ll do that later after first checking with more up to date Plasma version.
So instead of the broken UI I just enrolled a fingerprint using fprintd-enroll. Sometime during this short adventure the lock screen started telling me that to unlock I can either enter password, use a fingerprint sensor or a smart card. However, no matter how much I tried touching the sensor nothing happened. One more step was needed:
sudo apt install libpam-fprintd
sudo pam-auth-update
The second command lets you enable fingerprint auth. And now it works! I can:
- Unlock the lock screen
- Use fingerprint instead of password to use sudo in terminal
- Use fingerprint in UI PAM windows like when installing software
Also, using your password now still works as a backup option when the fingerprint sensor is not available (like when your laptop is docked and closed).
Unfortunately it’s still not possible to log-in using a fingerprint but let’s see, maybe we’ll get there one day.