It's always a bit of a "feels bad man" situation each time we have to start looking for alternatives for tools we often use and that have been discontinued.

That was exactly the case with Neofetch for me. I'll admit, Neofetch was not one of my most used apps, but I liked having it on all new OSes I test as I enjoyed how it just "prints" info in the Terminal.

Thankfully, in the open-source world, very little is outright lost, as most popular and generally loved projects are being taken under the wings of other developers who keep them alive and even improve them, which is exactly what happened with Fastfetch.

According to the project's GitHub repo, "Fastfetch is a neofetch-like tool for fetching system information and displaying it prettily."

At first glance, it looks and feels basically the same. However, after spending a bit of time with Fastfetch, I soon discovered that it's not only "different," but also a bit better than Neofetch.

For starters, the app is mostly written in C. This makes it (at least in theory) a bit faster. It's a lot more customizable than Neofetch. In short, the app uses JSONC (JSON comments) for configuration.

It has a few extra modules. The default configuration of the app ("fastfetch" command in the Terminal) only displays a couple of basic modules of information. To access all the supported modules, you have to run "fastfetch -c all"

Ok, Fastfetch might not be perfect for everyone (but that's a super generic statement, I'm aware). The thing that made Neofetch such a hit was its simplicity. For instance, if you run Fastfetch with all modules enabled, you'll have to scroll, or even resize the Terminal window accordingly, which can be a bit annoying for some users (me included).

There's also a thing in regards to how Fastfetch doesn't render the icons properly. Hence, you might want to install some third-party fonts (such as Nerdfonts symbols-only font).

Other than that, though, Fastfetch is the superior tool, for sure. It's actively maintained, it's a bit faster (but marginally, to be honest), has a lot more configuration options, and it's also arguably more accurate (as it supports Wayland).

There you have it - the perfect replacement tool for Neofetch. Install it, try it, and enjoy it.