Biopass - An alternative to Howdy

Modern multi-modal biometric login for Linux - face and fingerprint, with GUI management.

While Windows Hello provides a multi-modal biometric experience (Face, Fingerprint, PIN) on Windows 11, Linux has historically lacked a modern, unified equivalent. The most well-known project in this space, Howdy, focuses exclusively on facial recognition and has not seen significant updates in recent years.

Biopass is developed by @phucvinh57 and @thaitran24 to fill this gap, providing a fast, secure, and modern biometric suite that goes beyond just face ID.

I have seen some user feedback that they do not want to install an AI slop on their machine. I have no idea how they determine a project is a slop.

I started this project in 2024, before coding agents existed. I learned PAM, Tauri, face recognition and antispoofing, study CMake and Linux packaging by hand to build it. This is the most interesting project that I have built, at least until now.

However, I reach my limit so fast:

• Hardware: Cameras vary widely (some work with v4l2 but not libcamera, and vice versa), and I do not own most of them. Bug reports are often hard to reproduce, so fixes used to mean guessing, shipping a release candidate, and asking users to retest. Claude and Codex know a lot about these devices that I do not.
• Time: Life is difficult. I am just a regular person who is trying to survive. I have other things to do.

That is why I adopt AI to help maintain this project. If you do not want to use it just because Claude or Codex is in the contributor list, I do not care. To keep quality up, I follow Addy Osmani's article.

• Debian and RPM packages: https://github.com/phucvinh57/biopass/releases
• AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/biopass-bin

Setup guides:

• PAM (system sign-in, pam-auth-update on Debian/Ubuntu): docs/PAM.md
• Polkit (interactive authentication): docs/Polkit.md
• IR camera: docs/IR camera.md
• Keyring/KWallet unlock after face login (TPM-sealed password): docs/Keyring.md

• Authentication: register multiple biometrics, run methods in parallel or sequentially.
  • Face:
    • Recognition
    • Anti-spoofing
      • With AI model
      • With IR camera
  • Fingerprint
• Local AI model management: download, update, and delete models.
• GNOME Keyring/KWallet unlock

Bugs and feature requests: open an issue. To contribute, read CONTRIBUTING.md.

Models used in this project:

• Face Recognition: EdgeFace
• Face Detection: YOLO-Face