There is a guide for setting up howdy on OpenSUSE https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Facial_authentication
But it suggests to manually add a line to pam config files, which has been working for me for about a year (/etc/pam.d/common-auth). However recently almost every update overwrites this config and I constantly lose my ability to authenticate with it.
I have read the pam-config man page and explored YaST, could not find a way to add howdy “the right way” so it stays in place.
How do I make howdy authentication method persistent?
pam-config manages common-auth-pc file. By default common-auth is link to this file. If you break the link, then common-auth will no more be changed (of course you lose any future updates to default configuration installed by pam-config).
It does not point to that file specifically, but using it is universal (works for both sudo and GDM, for example). But it does only suggest manual config editing, which is volnurable to being overwritten.
Well, losing updates on this config is not a good solution, I think. At this point it looks easier to automate the addition of howdy line, but I still hope to learn how to anchor it there.
You could simply include common-auth-pc into common-auth … if you need to have special order, then the only real solution is to extend pam-config to support your module.