UX for Windows Hello™️ via Howdy

[hanaral]

The Howdy project seems to have near perfect integration with Windows Hello™️ compatable hardware, and integrates well with PAM.
The issue is similar to yubikey and nitrokey support, where there isn't any proper UX to show when it is trying to authenticate, or even to show you when it is scanning. I propose something similar to that of iOS, where there is a repeating animation when it is scanning, and a green tick/red cross to dispay whether it succeeded or failed. Maybe have a notification like bubble drop down from the north edge of the screen, since thats about where laptop cameras generally are

[cassidyjames]

I have been using a fork of Howdy on my Slimbook Pro X, and it works pretty well. But I agree we should integrate it and think about the UI. Rather than a new UI, I think we'd rather do something like this within the existing dialog:

Laptops especially may have any number of authentication methods set up, so we should group them into active or passive camps and treat them appropriately. Face auth would be passive, so we would still want to have a user interaction, which would be provided by the "Authenticate" button. I picture having a spinner to the right of the "Facial Recognition" item while it's detecting, and then changing it to the green success state with a process-completed icon if it succeeds, or a red failure state if it fails.

See also: #33 (comment)

[hanaral]

One of the developers on the Howdy issue tracker for UX has said that they are planning on making their own UI for it, I'm going to see if they can make it a module instead of it being forced.