SUMMARY Howdy stop working properly (around end of December for me) with KScreenLocker. At the beginning, I thought it was an issue caused by the Python 3.9 -> 3.10 update, but today I found this issue: https://github.com/boltgolt/howdy/issues/551 Where it has been suggested that is a KScreenLocker issue. I open this issue so maybe you can have a look. I can confirm that howdy works just fine with other applications (e.g. sudo, Polkit KDE Agent, etc.) and it works with KScreenLocker with the following workaround: sudo chmod u+s /usr/lib/kcheckpass STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Install and configure howdy 2. Lock the screen 3. Press enter on the password field without writing anything OBSERVED RESULT Howdy does not work and some entries like this one are added to the journal: /lib/security/howdy/pam.py[1992]: Can not open module: Permission denied EXPECTED RESULT SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: Arch Linux KDE Plasma Version: 5.23.90 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.90.0 Qt Version: 5.15.2 Kernel Version: 5.16.5-arch1-1 (64-bit) Graphics Platform: X11 Processors: 8 × 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz Memory: 15.4 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: Mesa Intel® Xe Graphics
kscreenlocker runs authentication as the current logged in user. Your comments imply howdy requires root. It's howdy's job to abstract that in the same way pam_unix does.
In the howdy open issue they imply that this is a KScreenLocker bug, here that is a howdy bug. Maybe you can give your arguments in the issue upstream?