I recently purchased a Laptop from DELL, a Precision 5560. It comes equipped with a Goodix fingerprint reader.

On the laptop I installed Arch Linux, installed fprintd and the goodix drivers were installed aswell. This way I was able to setup the fingerprint reader for logging into the device using Gnome.

I scanned my right thumb and index fingers, they worked very nicely.

A bit later I decided to try another operating system so I installed Fedora on the laptop. It came with fprintd and the driver "preinstalled" so I went ahead and tried setting up my fingerprints again.

Only to be greated with an error message:

The fingerprint you are trying to setup is too similar to one already enrolled.

I get this error for the right thumb and index fingers, other fingers can be setup without issue. I setup my pinky finger, removed it and reinstalled the OS and the pinky could still be setup.

Replacing the motherboard of the laptop resolved the issue but this seems to be a rather crude solution. Using fprintd to clean the stored fingerprints doesnt work. It seems to be that the fingerprint reader has its own storage which cannot be easily accessed.

Sidenote, windows stores biometrics on the normal filesystem apparently so windows has no issue using the two mentioned fingers and even setting up the OS again after wiping the disk works flawlessly.

Is there a way to clear the fingerprints of the device without having to replace the whole device? I believe it is possible to reliably reproduce this issue on similar devices and it is probably affecting more if not all linux based usecases of the fingerprint reader.