pearOS's "Touch ID" page (System Settings, and on the first-boot setup wizard) is a UI on top of the standard Linux fingerprint daemon, fprintd - it comes installed by default on both builds (it's a dependency of the Settings app itself), so if you have a fingerprint reader, enrolling should work out of the box.

To enroll a fingerprint: open System Settings → Touch ID and follow the prompts (this runs fprintd-enroll for you). You can list or delete enrolled fingerprints from the same page.

"No fingerprint device found" but you know your laptop has one? The device check only looks for it over USB (lsusb). Many laptop fingerprint readers are actually internal I2C/SPI devices (common on ultrabooks, e.g. Goodix sensors) and won't show up that way even if fprintd supports them. Check manually first:

fprintd-list $USER

If that responds instead of erroring out, the sensor is supported - the Settings page is just wrong about "no device", not fprintd itself.

Important: enrolling a fingerprint does not make it usable for login/sudo/unlock by itself. pearOS doesn't wire fingerprint auth into PAM automatically on either build - enrolling just registers the fingerprint with fprintd. To actually use it to log in or for sudo, you need to add fprintd's PAM module yourself:

pearOS NiceC0re (Arch-based)

Add auth sufficient pam_fprintd.so as the first auth line in /etc/pam.d/sudo (and/or /etc/pam.d/system-local-login for the lock screen/login manager) - see the official Arch Wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fprint

pearOS Goldwing (Debian-based)

sudo pam-auth-update

and enable the "Fingerprint authentication" profile from the list - see the official Debian docs: https://wiki.debian.org/fprint

Be careful editing PAM files by hand - keep a root terminal open while testing so you can revert if you lock yourself out.