How to get the GNOME version?

Question

Is there an authoritative way to get the GNOME version, as long as I have a working GNOME desktop (any version) running? Several of these suggestions don't work on my system, either because the executables and/or packages simply don't exist or the menu item isn't available.

Answer 1

For GNOME 4, they use gnome-shell version. If we look at the source code we can see they are reporting the gnome-shell version as the "GNOME version" in the Settings > Info panel:

static char *
get_gnome_version (GDBusProxy *proxy)
{
  g_autoptr(GVariant) variant = NULL;
  const char *gnome_version = NULL;
  if (!proxy)
    return NULL;

  variant = g_dbus_proxy_get_cached_property (proxy, "ShellVersion");
  if (!variant)
    return NULL;

  gnome_version = g_variant_get_string (variant, NULL);
  if (!gnome_version || *gnome_version == '\0')
    return NULL;
  return g_strdup (gnome_version);
}

There's a debate right now whether this was the right thing to do, see
info-overview: rename "GNOME Version" to "GNOME Shell Version"
Note the intro to that discussion confirms what I've been saying all the time:

The GNOME version and the GNOME Shell version are not the same thing...

It wouldn't surprise me if they change it again in the future. Until then, to get the Gnome DE version means to get the gnome-shell version so use either

gnome-shell --version

or

busctl --user get-property org.gnome.Shell /org/gnome/Shell org.gnome.Shell ShellVersion

---

In GNOME 3, version is stored in this file:

/usr/share/gnome/gnome-version.xml

content (on my system):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<gnome-version>
 <platform>3</platform>
 <minor>6</minor>
 <micro>2</micro>
 <distributor>Arch Linux</distributor>
 <date>2012-11-13</date>
</gnome-version>

The file is part of the upstream package called gnome-desktop (note that some distros split it into several packages so on your distro the file may end up in a package with a different name...)

GNOME developers use this file to get the DE version number and display it in System Settings (aka gnome-control-center). So getting GNOME version "the official way" means parsing the said file and extracting platform, minor and micro values.

If you play with that file you can instantly see the results :)

In GNOME 2 the file in question is:

/usr/share/gnome-about/gnome-version.xml

(though this file might be missing on some older Gnome 2 versions IIRC)

---

Note that for GNOME v.2 & v.3 commands like gnome-session --version, gnome-shell --version, gdm --version etc might return confusing numbers. Those are GNOME desktop components, they are separate packages (with different code, history/changelog and maintainers) and as such their version may be different. They'll report the right GNOME version only if they have the same version as gnome-desktop (which is not always the case).

Answer 2

If you launch gnome-system-monitor it shows the version in the dialog:

% gnome-system-monitor

My aging Fedora 14 box

            

Ubuntu 12.04

             

Answer 3

$ apt-cache show gnome-shell | grep Version

(Vivid or Wily)

Answer 4

Try gnome-session --version. There is a man page for it on my Debian (namely GNOME-SESSION(1)) but the --version option is not listed. Well, for me it says gnome-session 3.4.2.1.

You can run it in the console

DISPLAY=":0" gnome-session --version

(possibly having to change the display).

Answer 5

For very new Gnome systems (>40ish), the file suggested in @don_crissti's answer is not here anymore:

~$ cat /usr/share/gnome/gnome-version.xml                          
cat: /usr/share/gnome/gnome-version.xml: No such file or directory

I think that the safer way is to follow the official GNOME suggestion:

Which, in my system, gives:

Answer 6

"gnome-shell --version" is showing 3.28.3 in my terminal window.