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In the latest monthly news roundup from the Linux Mint team, the developers announced a feature that users have wanted for a long, long time. The famously user-friendly distribution is finally getting proper, integrated support for fingerprint login. For a distro that has built its reputation on providing a comfortable, "it just works" experience for people new to Linux, the absence of this convenient security feature has been a noticeable gap, especially on modern laptops.
The new feature will arrive in Linux Mint 22.2, powered by Fingwit, a brand new XApp built by the Mint developers. It handles detecting your fingerprint reader and recording your prints. Once configured, you can use your fingerprint for the login screen, the screensaver, authenticating sudo commands, and any other administrative actions that pop up a password dialog (pkexec).
What makes this particularly interesting is how it deals with situations where a fingerprint just will not work. Fingwit uses fprintd for the backend work, but the Mint devs say its custom authentication module is clever enough to detect tricky cases. For instance, if your home directory is encrypted, you absolutely need your password to decrypt it at login. Just using a fingerprint would lead to a crashed session. Fingwit sees this coming and dynamically prompts for your password instead. The Mint team says Fingwit will be able to run "in any desktop environment and on any Linux distribution."
A significant driver for this development has been the team's ongoing work with Framework. Testing the company's hardware has pushed the Mint team to better support the features packed into modern laptops. This partnership is also the reason Mint 22.1 got power profiles and why Mint 22.2 will ship with a newer HWE (hardware enablement) kernel.
The team also announced a slew of other changes for the upcoming release. As part of this work, core applications like gnome-calendar, simple-scan (the document scanner), and baobab (the disk usage analyzer) will be upgraded to their newer libAdwaita versions. To solve the long-standing frustration of libAdwaita apps ignoring system themes, the developers have patched the library. Taking it a step further, they have forked it entirely into a new project called libAdapta.
On a final, critical note, the team also had a serious warning for users of older versions. The Linux Mint 20.x series, which includes versions 20, 20.1, 20.2, and 20.3, officially reached its End of Life in April 2024. Your system will continue to function, but it will no longer receive any security updates from the official repositories, leaving it vulnerable. The team laid out two options. The recommended path is a fresh installation of a newer release (22.1), which provides support until 2029 and is the cleanest way forward. Alternatively, you can attempt a long and complicated in-place upgrade, which is a multi-step process from 20.x to 21.3.
