Fastfetch is the Perfect Replacement for Neofetch

When development on system info tool Neofetch was discontinued¹ earlier this year a slew of forks, alternatives, and upstart projects sprung up to fill the void.

Yet the Neofetch alternative that’s gained the most traction —anecdotally, at least; I’ve not be creeping around Linux conferences to verify first-hand—is Fastfetch.

Fastfetch is similar to Neofetch in that it ‘pretty prints’ information about your OS, desktop environment, pertinent underlying technologies, and selected system hardware specs in a terminal window.

But Fastfetch is far more capable than Neofetch: it’s faster, more featured², supports Wayland (Neofetch technically didn’t), and is actively maintained.

Indeed, the Fastfetch bills itself as “a neofetch-like tool for fetching system information and displaying it prettily. It is written mainly in C, with performance and customizability in mind.”

A burgeoning community has grown up around the tool since 2023, many drawn to it customisation potential (and yes, I’m emphasising Fastfetch‘s customisation prowess because it’s one of the most compelling aspects to it).

See, I’m accustomed to Neofetch. I’ve used it for a long, long time. While Fastfetch is very informative out-of-the-box, I find the amount of detail it shows me a little too much. I have to scroll or resize my terminal to see it all – not great for screenshots!

So I love that this tool is very easy to control, tweak, and fine-tune. It’s possible to choose which stats are shown, in what order, how they format their data, the colours, icons, and syntax they use, and so on.

If that sound like effort, no worries – someone else has done the hard-graft for you since Fastfetch bundles in over 20 presets and examples you can preview, including a 1:1 Neofetch clone.

Once you find a setup you like, make it the default by generating a local config file (fastfetch --gen-config), copy the contents of your desired .jsonc file to this local config, then hit save. When you next run fastfetch, that’s the output you see.

But perhaps there are things you’d like to add? Maybe you’d like to see battery info, or show now playing status in your print out? You can do that too thanks to a myriad of supported modules. Make things less verbose, or make ’em way more elaborate – it’s up to you!

Icons don’t render in Fastfetch? Just download the Nerdfonts symbols-only font zip, extract, install the font, refresh your font cache, and you should be good to go as! The terminal falls back to a supported unicode font for missing symbols (only; text unaffected).

Install Fastfetch on Ubuntu

Fastfetch is free, open source software available on GitHub and licensed under the MIT license. It is a distinct project in its own right, not a continuation or fork of Neofetch, but a grade-a replacement for it.

Fastfetch is packaged in the Ubuntu 24.10 repositories, meaning you don’t need to futz around with extracurricular packaging formats to try it. A simple sudo apt install fastfetch fetches it, fast³.

However, Ubuntu 24.10 ships with 2.15.x which is a way behind the latest 2.23 release (and recent releases include a number of big improvements).

So Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04 and 24.10 you can use an unofficial (but officially endorsed) Fastfetch PPA to get the latest, or download the DEB installer from the project’s Github releases pagefiref

and install it manually.

1. Discontinued but still works, however there will be quirks, bugs, and issues detecting/conveying specs/details on newer hardware/distros/tech stack as time goes on ↩︎
2. Run fastfetch -c all.jsonc to see all of the available modules ↩︎
3. Or not-so-fast if your internet connection is poor, ofc ↩︎