Howdy doesn't see dlib even though installed with pip

[NotoriousD69420]

I am currently trying to install howdy (2.6.1) on Debian Trixie (Cinnamon DE), and am following this guide (first commment). I have completed the instructions as per u/Helipil0t has posted. When I use the command "sudo howdy add" to add my face as one that can be recognized, I get this error:

sudo howdy add
No module named 'dlib'

Can't import the dlib module, check the output of
pip3 show dlib

I have installed dlib through pip3, and this is the result of the command "pip3 show dlib":

pip3 show dlib
Name: dlib
Version: 19.24.6
Summary: A toolkit for making real world machine learning and data analysis applications
Home-page: https://github.com/davisking/dlib
Author: Davis King
Author-email: davis@dlib.net
License: Boost Software License
Location: /home/kingd/.local/lib/python3.13/site-packages
Requires:
Required-by:

if someone would be able to help out, that would be just great. It also caused problems with my password after coming back from screen lock (password only necessary).

[danielgerardcarvalho]

I'm not completely up to speed on all distros and their update schedule but i ran into the same issue on Mint (Cinnamon DE). Digging a bit, it seems that the current system python interpreter cant run import dlib due to PEP668 changes coming into force. Where in the python interpreter the system is using is marked as externally-managed and therefore any attempt to change it.

Using pip install dlib also gives an error since pip cant drop in changes in the system python anymore either. You can use python3-xyz method with apt as the error message suggests with --break-system-packages but the name says it all.

Best approach I see is from the maintainers, they're building their own locally and adding it as a package. That's the route I took as well and it worked.

Note there are some caveats: it seems pypi-download is broken, not sure why but as a result I had to go down the very convoluted process of trying to build the .deb in various ways. Got a lot of issues stdeb that were resolved in a .venv. Since the issues seem to be with stdeb just being a bit outdated (missing SafeConfigParser, distutils, pkg_resources) finally just pulling the most recent versions of things from github and builing in the .venv environment succeeded. I'll add the files here as spiritual successor to this post.

You can find the .deb here: link