Nah, I’m also fine with it. Fingerprint sensors hate me anyway, on every phone I owned I needed to rescan my prints every few weeks or so because they just won’t recognise me after a while. These days I just use passwords and pin codes.
System 76 laptop has fingerprint sensor. They don’t say it has one cuz it’s not supported.
And since it’s designed to be used as a tap/scan, and power button only on hard restart/shutdown it’s hard to press to stop it being pressed on fingerprint scan, the hardware not being supported means you have to press the power button a lot instead of fingerprint.
I’ve had good luck with the fingerprint scanners in various HP business laptops and fprint. The one on my old Dell laptop was straight-up unsupported though.
I have a windows laptop with a fingerprint sensor that worked exactly like this lol
I’d reinstall the driver, it would work for a day, then stop working. One day I updated the laptop to Windows 11 and I think it fixed it, but is it worth the ads coming soon? I will see.
And that’s because your laptop is a thinkpad, indeed I got my fingerprint reader working on my ideapad because it has the same fingerprint reader of a thinkpad, but to get it working I needed to install the driver myself
Weirdly enough, I’ve never got fprint working on my thinkpad (albeit I’ve only attempted twice).
Both times, it works fine whenever I only set up my index finger. Adding my thumb (or any other finger) then prevents either from working, removing either finger removes both, and then prevents me from adding it back.
I have no idea why I’m having this issue, but I’m assuming I’m just missing something.
If anyone is worrying about security, don’t use it for that, or at all if you don’t want, but it sure is nice to have that option if/when I want.
Seriously, I have multiple layers of security - extremely long & complex & unique passwords plus 2FA for banking, another (different) password and a PIV for work, etc. - and I really enjoy being able to get back into my desktop at a moment’s notice after grabbing a coffee. It even enhances security in several ways: e.g. by facilitating using a shorter time-out until the system asks for authentication, plus allows you to use a more complex password for your account, knowing that you won’t have to type the whole damn thing in 50 times a day. Also, even if someone had a literal camera over your shoulder watching you type your password (work? public space like library?), they would not get your fingerprint that particular way. Or if you really want to get paranoid (I don’t think Mac will let you do this by default without additional software though), you could require both password + fingerprint?
It is also worth noting that the issues for desktops are not identical to those of mobile devices: someone would have to gain physical access to my machine in the first place (afaik? now I wonder about that though… are the security credentials stored in a less secure manner that a remote intrusion could spoof more readily?), which is far less common than a mobile device that you take with you and is also smaller so more easily stolen.
Protect the stuff you value the most, but for the common stuff it is nice to have a quicker method of access. Like everything else, this is merely one tool in your toolbox that you can decide how & when to use appropriately.
I stopped using them altogether when my job provisioned a YubiKey. Got one for personal usage and it's pretty solid for just about everything I'd have used a fingerprint sensor for.
And I’m sure that there’s a completely closed, separated and proprietary subsystem in your CPU that has access to everything happening on your computer. Literally everything, all input and output, everything the CPU is doing, just everything. Look up Intel ME or AMD PSP
Got it working on my ThinkPad t480 - realised I can only maybe sometimes log into the user account. Can’t replace sudo, gpg, or any other type of password, and if I remember correctly it couldn’t even unlock the screen. Gave up on that idea completely.
Funnily enough, the actual fingerprint recognition was more often successful on Linux than on windows.
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