For a while now, the fingerprint management UI in GNOME Settings (gnome-control-center) has felt outdated. While it worked, the layout and enrollment flow hadn’t kept up with the rest of GNOME’s modern interface updates.

I am happy that during the GNOME 51 development cycle we managed to address that. Allan Day, Marco Trevisan, and myself worked on modernizing the interface . There’s still more work to do in the UI and in fprintd, but what we will ship in 51 is already a great step forward.

Historically, the fingerprint dialog in User Settings was stuck on a GTK3-style design. Even after being ported to GTK4, conceptually it remained unchanged. Beyond looking out of place alongside Libadwaita-based settings panels, it suffered from responsiveness and accessibility issues that made it difficult for some users to enroll their prints.

The new fingerprint management dialog uses a standard boxed list displaying your enrolled fingers. From here, each enrolled finger can be removed individually.

Clicking the “Add Fingerprint” button starts the finger enrollment process. First, you choose one of the unused finger options to enroll. From there, an assistant guides you through the scanning process. As you place your finger on the reader, the UI detects the touch and provides feedback on whether it was read correctly. You continue touching the reader until enough samples have been collected (the exact number depends on your reader’s driver). Once the progress bar fills, your finger is ready for authentication.

This is only one of the improvements that GNOME 51 is bringing. As with everything in GNOME, we will continue gathering user feedback and making iterations over time. There are already more fingerprint features in the pipeline, such as renaming enrolled fingers and verifying individual prints. Stay tuned!