The start menu is a DE (Desktop Environment) thing (like gnome, kde, xfce), not a distribution one, So a "about" would only tell you that you got i.e. Plasma 5.17 installed, not anything about the distro that included that version of Plasma.

Pressing K Menu and typing "about" brings up a window stating "Debian GNU/Linux 10" in large letters (With Plasma/KDE/Qt/Kernel version info underneath). Which is nice.
With Cinnamon I had to figure out it was "system info" to get an equivalent screen - "about" returns no results.

Irrespective of any other methods, I agree that every DE having an equivalent comprehensive GUI "about" option would be a good thing.


As for command line, I always thought "uname -a" was supposed to be the primary method, though I've often found it excludes or abbreviate distro information.

Examination of the list of repositories will reveal the distro & version...

2 members found this post helpful.

Not a helpful comment. We're all human you know.
Windows has a properties option on the computer Icon context. Clicking this tells you which version of windows is running, version number etc

Also, you have many applications on your distro. Most if not all have a Help/About, which tells you the name of the application, and which version.
Browsers are a case in point. Very useful for diagnostics.


I didn't say they were here to serve anyone. If it was me and I wrote a distro, I'd make it easy, just saying you know.
I was just trying to make a point, a bit of humour. Besides, I'm pretty sure if we did a survey of a million average computer users and asked them if they thought it did or didn't matter if they couldn't identify what OS is was, I'd guess at least 75% would say it would matter.

I think 99% would know what distro they had installed.

The other 1% could have a printed sticker physically affixed to the hardware.

1 members found this post helpful.