Neofetch is BLOAT! Try pfetch instead.

one of the most popular terminal applications out there is a program called neo fetch neo fetch is a command line system information tool you see it in a ton of screenshots out there you see it on subreddits like our slash UNIX porn anytime you want to rice your desktop and make a really cool screenshot it's almost a requirement that neo fetch has to be in the screenshot neo fetch again it's just the system information tool it provides a little bit of information about your current situation now there's one problem with neo fetch and the reason I kind of quit using neo fetch I no longer you know have it launched by default in either my bash shell or my zs8 shell is because it's slow and quite frankly it's kind of bloated neo fetches bloat and I found an alternative to it the other day called P fetch that's what I want to share with you today let's get started [Music] before I get started I just want to briefly mention a little more about neo fetch now neo fetch is a fantastic program but the reason I quit using it actually a few months back I just I took it out of my bash RC and my C SHRC files I no longer want neo fetch to ever run automatically it's because it takes you know like a second to load a second doesn't sound like much but when I want to open I want to just open my terminal and immediately begin typing and neo fetch was kind of slow to load the reason it's slow to load is because it is too much stuff going on in neo fetch is trying to show a little bit too much information if I pull the terminal back up you can see this our co Linux logo and this is the same size for all the logos from the regardless of distribution takes up too much space that's a big logo and then it's pulling down all this information OS kernel up down packages shell resolution window manager theme icons terminal terminal thoughts CPU GPU and ram not to mention it does give the host and username of the machine and it even gives the color palette for your terminal color scheme as we'll now that's a lot of information but do you really need that information for one thing if this was information for me only I don't need any of this information to be honest I know what OS I'm running I know what kernel I'm probably running I know the shell I mean I know my screen resolution I know the window manager I'm running so really none of this is useful information to me it's something maybe the uptime and maybe the kernel version if I wasn't sure what kernel I was running but for screenshots neo fetch is really cool like if you want to share a screenshot it's nice because people will often ask you what are you running they'll know I'm running or co Linux but a lot of this information is pointless for somebody in a screen shot to know they don't need to know how exactly how many packages I have installed on the system they don't care about my uptime so it's just a little bit too much information so I wanted something a little bit more minimal then neo fetch no again neo fetch is fantastic just a little slow well I found this get lab page the other day you fetch now you fetch is really nice it is a collection of basically just simple shell scripts I don't know how many maybe about 50 anyway you go in here and you find the you fetch script for your distro I'm running arco linux so i just grabbed this script for you fetch - arco and it will display this in the shell this very clean and minimal arco linux logo much smaller than that Neil fetch logo so I really like that takes up a lot less space and then it doesn't share like a 15 different system monitoring you know pieces of information it just loads user at hostname of course and then OS kernel uptime package is installed and the shell I'm running and that's it it doesn't tell me the terminal font I'm using or the CPU I'm using doesn't give me information about RAM or anything like that honestly if I want to know about RAM usage you know I'm gonna fire up something like a CH top anyway I don't know having that load up and something like neo fetch which doesn't update in real time anyway it's kind of pointless so there's these simple you fetch scripts were really nice so I'm gonna post a link to you fetch in the comments but you fetch was not what I wanted to talk about today I wanted to talk about this over on github P fetch now P fetch what they did is they took some of those scripts from you fetch these simple scripts and they took this and made it into a more interactive tool instead of having to go grab the specific you fetch script for your distro with p fetch it automatically determines what distro you're running and it runs the appropriate script so p fetch is written in posix-compliant chill which is fantastic and you get something much more minimal like this here is an example of the output from p fetch right here in this screenshot very simple very clean let me show you yet on my system let me get back to my terminal I'm gonna clear the screen here and what I'm going to do is I'm gonna relaunch my zsh session because I already have zsh in my zsh RC file written it to automatically run P fetch and that is what P fetch looks like on my computer now one problem I noticed right away using P fetch the OS is wrong Arch Linux I'm running Arco and yes there's actually Arco Linux script in P fetch I don't know why it determines that I'm running Arch instead of Arco so that's a glitch I'm sure I could probably fix that then the host I'm assuming this is supposed to be like a host machine maybe om manufacturer stuff I don't know I would probably just delete that put something else there myself kernel uptime number of packages installed I do notice it doesn't separate packages the way neo fetch does neo fetch tells me the packages that are installed from the repos as well as packages that are installed as a flat pack and as a snap here it just tells me sixteen hundred and sixty seven packages I'm not exactly sure if it includes snaps and flat packs in that I have to check on that and it tells me what the RAM usage was when I launched this I'm gonna go back to the P fetch github page and then there get up page this file right here P fetch is actually the script and that is actually what you execute to run P fetch and that's just a simple shell script it's about a thousand lines ten looks like 1030 lines just chill scripting basically all it does is it asks your computer exactly what OS it is and then it you know spits out you know there were the appropriate logo and system information so if it's alpine it draws this logo if it's arch it draws this logo which is know what it's currently drawing on mine because it incorrectly determined I was running arch but really I'm running arco you see they have a logo for arco again is some kind of glitch it's but anyway it's got you know Debian elementary for door you know openSUSE Gentoo a boon to me and everything else in here I say even got some of the BSD s that's the OpenBSD logo pop OS is in here Slackware and even void anyway what I really like about this is it loads much quicker than what Neal Fitch did so let me load Neal fish so you can see so if I run Neal one more time and that actually wasn't too bad of course I this is a beast of a machine I'm on - these are good specs I have but you know it still takes just a second but now let me run P Fitch so let me relaunch zsh no P fetch just loads almost instantly it's a little quicker and yes quite frankly it's just a little cleaner right this is just a little cleaner I would prefer having this in a screen shot because neo Fitch I don't know for me it's it's just a little bit too much it's a little too gaudy we're putting too much in the terminal right and it's information nobody cares about does anybody really care you know my icon theme is Sardi arc in the screenshot where I'm showing a terminal anyway I didn't even know what Ikon said I was running because I rarely ever open a graphical file manager anyway so the icon said you know one interesting thing I just realised that's like making this video so this is the neo Fitch github and looks like it's Dylan a reps is the user named Elana reps maybe it looks like it's a avatar anyway is of a woman anyway look at the github page 4p fetch it's the same lady that's the same person that made neo fetch made P fetch very cool so you've got neo fetch more bloated option P fetch for the more minimalist I kind of like it I need to dig around in the code and figure out why are Co Linux is not being registered correctly in my P fetch of course if it really bothered me that much I could hack on the code I could actually just go grab one of the you fetch scripts if I wanted to you know over on get lab I'm not sure exactly who's maintaining these scripts but I could just use the you fetch our code which is basically what P fetch was using anyway and just because I do I really need a massive 1,000 line shell script to determine what OS and window manager and everything I'm running when I could just go grab this I don't know 50 line script that might be the more minimal option either way anyway before I go and this show was made possible by Hanson first Chris second Chris DJ Dylan George Mitchell neh tech Philip Rob Robert Sam and Willie they are the producers of the show they are my highest tier patrons over on patreon without these guys you wouldn't know about P Fitch right now also brought to you by all those other fine ladies and gentlemen all those names you see on the screen that help support my work over on patreon without these guys again the show wouldn't be possible you'd like to support the channel please consider doing so you'll find me at distro tube over on patreon all right yes peace [Music]

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 84,746

Keywords: Linux, terminal, command line, screenshots, neofetch, pfetch, ufetch, system information, shell script

Id: zput0Ir8XPM

Length: 10min 32sec (632 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 26 2019