Fingerprint reader on Fedora w/ xfce, FW 13 AMD

Framework Laptop 13 Linux
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I recently got my Framework 13 AMD and I really love it so far, and decided to take the opportunity to finally try and use Linux as a daily driver. I installed Fedora and, after some experimenting landed on using XFCE with some minor tweaks. However - while I was able to enroll my fingerprint in Gnome, and have it work, now that I’m in XFCE its stopped being able to be used for login or authorizing sudo commands.

I’m not sure if this is just something XFCE doesn’t support out of the box, or if me messing with other DEs might have broken something (I installed Plasma between the two, and uninstalled it after landing on XFCE). I installed fprintd and tried to enroll my finger again, but it says its already in there. I’m still pretty new to Linux as a whole so apologies if I’m missing something obvious.

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If you’re new to Linux I would suggest sticking with gnome and looking at extensions to augment the experience for example dash to dock and application menu are two very popular and useful ones.

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Welcome to the community!

I would echo Mario’s advice here as any workarounds to get the reader working on XFCE is going to be hit and miss. For logging in especially.

So with the understanding that you will be happiest with the compatibility of GNOME on Fedora, you can do some things to make sure everything remains correct:

  • fprintd-verify: (Run this to test and make sure your fingeprints are still good from the CLI.

  • For sudo only:
    You should be good to go (if this was on GNOME). For XFCE, if you passed the fprintd-verify test, sudo should be good to go. But I have not tested this personally on XFCE, so no idea.

Again, ideally you want to be in GNOME and ideally, this should not be needed. I highly recommend using Fedora Workstation 39 (GNOME) instead.

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I’m not totally new, I’ve messed with it before for a server I have, just never committed to using it in a desktop environment beyond messing around. That said, I’m not completely opposed to using gnome, there were just some things I couldn’t find an easy way to tweak (fine-grained display scaling, scroll speed) to the point where I figured I may as well try something slightly more custom. The XFCE setup I have works great so far, fingerprint aside.

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Thanks for the advice, I’ll try switching to Gnome again for a bit and seeing if I can replicate the workflow I had on XFCE.

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