Neofetch is out, but many screenshot and system information tools are ready

Four terminal windows open different tools for retrieving system information — Increase / Sorry about all the black space in the bottom right corner. Nerdfetch doesn’t make good use of the space it’s been given — unlike the Asahi install on this MacBook.

Kevin Purdy

Almost no one really needed Neofetch, but the people who used it? They really liked it.

Neofetch, run from a terminal, displayed key system information alongside an ASCII-art image of the operating system or distribution running on it. You knew most of this data, but if you were taking a screenshot of your system, it looked cool and conveyed a lot of information in a small space. “The overall goal of Neofetch is to use it in screenshots of your system,” Neofetch creator Dylan Araps wrote in a Github repository. “Neofetch shows you information that other people want to see.”

Neofetch did this by providing some nice screenshots and proof-of-life images of nearly 150 versions of the operating system by the end of April. The tool was last updated three years ago, and Araps’ Github profile now includes the rather concise code: “I took up farming.” Araps joins “moved to a commune in Vermont” and “now I make furniture out of wood” in the pantheon of programmers who don’t just leave the field, they escape it into a completely different world.

As sometimes happens, the void was filled not by one decent replacement, but by many.

Fastfetch, which is actually quite fast and apparently recognizes more distros (e.g. Asahi Linux on an ARM MacBook).

Kevin Purdy
Hyfetch, which gives you a ton of pride flag options when you first start it up, but can also be used without pride colors.
Nerdfetch, which I’ve never been able to get working perfectly with Nerdfonts, Cozette, or Phosphor. It’s small, which can be useful, but it mostly shows the Tux penguin, not the OS-specific ASCII image.
Cpufetch, which, as the name suggests, introduces much more data about the integrated circuit into the term.

Neo-Neofetches

Fastfetch has apparently taken over the default forum/thread/blog recommendation as a replacement for Neofetch. It is under active development, with changes occurring just hours before this post was published. It is highly configurable, available on most major platforms and distributions, and extensible via modules. It supports Wayland, provides more detailed memory and storage statistics, and, as the name suggests, is generally faster. It is FOSS and has a tutorial on customizing and extending Fastfetch.

NerdFetch offers the kind of icon customization you might expect if you’re the type who takes meticulously organized screenshots of your desktop. By installing one of Nerd Fonts’ glyph-laden fonts, you can replace the text inside the readout with icons that you can read at a glance. It’s available for POSIX-compliant systems (“Anything but Windows”). It lacks many of the customization and modular options, as well as the large, custom operating system logo (it appears to show a very abstract ASCII Tux on both macOS and Asahi Linux). But it’s also compact and a bit different.

What else? There’s hyfetch, which is “neofetch with pride flags”, but it also includes “neowofetch”, which is an updated neofetch without pride coloring. The Macchina System Info tool is written in Rust and offers themes, being “basic by default and extensible by design”. And cpufetch is, as you can imagine, a lot more CPU data, along with the logo. Interestingly, cpufetch showed “arm” rendering when I ran it under Asahi Linux on a MacBook, but then the Apple logo on macOS. It works both ways! Just interesting.

If you’ve taken the time to get your Linux desktop exactly the way you like it—or just install Linux on a device that doesn’t want it—then you’ll want to show it off. These aren’t the last apps you’ll see that will try to make your download work, but they’re a good start.

Offer image by Kevin Purdy