It’s important to stay up to date – both for security and compatibility reasons and because it’s always nice to have the latest features in your Linux Operating System.
To find out which Linux distribution, and version of that distribution you’re using, use one of the below methods on both the server and desktop versions of Ubuntu based systems:
Getting Your Ubuntu Version by reading from the /etc/issue file
Type the following into your terminal to read the contents of the file /etc/issue into your terminal:
cat /etc/issue
You’ll get your Ubuntu version as below:
Ubuntu 20.10
You can also get more information by running:
cat /etc/os-release
Which will print out more detail, like the OS codename.
Getting Your Ubuntu Version with lsb_release
Many Ubuntu installations will let you type:
lsb_release
…into the terminal on desktop or server installations of Ubuntu to get information on the current version. Not all installations will support this as it depends on the lsb_core package being installed, so it’s not really recommended.
If you want to show the version information only, you can pass the -d option:
lsb_release -d
…to display all available information
lsb_release -a
