Ubuntu 20.04 PAM problem

Hi,

I recently installed Howdy from binary packages from PPA on Ubuntu 20. It is a freshly installed OS, almost empty, recently set up email and other system accounts, and have not used it for more than a few days now, so it can be considered clean.

The issue I am seeing is that howdy works great in terms of GDM and sudo in a terminal window for example, but as soon as I enable it and finish my OS session (be it logout-login or reboot) and start a new session there are two specific applications that cease to work from then on:

- element-desktop
- evolution

I do not know what these have to do with PAM or any Linux authentication that can be affected by Howdy, but the problem instantly disappears after i issue 'sudo howdy disable 1', no need to reboot.

I noticed one more thing: opening files on network folders also stops working through smb on-demand mount, I assume any other share/export that needs authentication, but I am not in a position to test further right now.

I did not recognize any other apps having problems, otherwise Howdy works great. Therefore I do not think it is application version specific,

Versions:
OS: Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS
Howdy 2.6.1
element-desktop 1.7.23
evolution 3.36.4

Best,

Pal

Start by reproducing the failure on Ubuntu 20.04 with Howdy 2.6.1: enable it, log out or reboot, then test Element, Evolution, and SMB on-demand mounts. Compare the same session after running `sudo howdy disable 1`; done means identifying the affected PAM authentication path and confirming those applications work across a session restart.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.