How to check which version of Linux Mint you are using

In this tutorial you will learn different methods to check which version of Linux version you are using.

This information is useful when you are having issues and want to troubleshoot them, or simply want to know more about the operating system that you are using.

You can read this information via different methods, via System info app or via terminal by typing the command.

Checking which version via Menu

Go to "Menu" , next go to  "Preferences" and select "System info" from the list of the apps on the right side

or simply type System Info in the search bar so the "System Info" app comes up.

And the System Info window will show up with all the information about your version of Linux mint

Note: The button "Upload system information" uploads all the data you see on the window above to an server online, actually the uploaded data contains a lot more information than shown on the system info window, so please do this at your own risk.

When you click to that button, it runs the inxi command

inxi -Fxxrzc0

You can run this command on terminal and see the information that gets uploaded to the server if you click the upload button, the purpose and the goal of this feature is for troubleshooting and reporting bugs, however you should know what information you upload online to a server that you don't own. Better safe than sorry!

Checking which version via Terminal

Command 1

The Linux Standard Base Command will display distributor id, distro name, distro description, release number and codename of the os.

The output of the command should look like the image shown below

lsb_release -a

Command 2

By using the cat command you can read the information that's located on /etc/linuxmint/info, just type cat /etc/linuxmint/info and it will display more details about your distro in this case Linux Mint

As you can see on the image above, the output contains release, codename, edition, description, desktop, toolkit, new features, release notes, user guide and grub title.

If you want this information exported to a txt file, you can do so by simply running the command below

This command will create a txt file with all the output shown on the terminal

cat /etc/linuxmint/info > info.txt

For example: I'm running this command from "Desktop" which means the file named info.txt  which contains all the information about your Linux mint ,  will be created on Desktop.

You can also set your preferred path where you want this file to be created by specifying the path location, replace /home/user/folder/ with your own path.

cat /etc/linuxmint/info > /home/user/folder/info.txt

The "info.txt" file should look like this

Conclusion

By now you should know how to check which version and more details about Linux Mint. There are more commands to do this, but I covered the ones that are very easy and display more than enough information about distro name, version, release etc.