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This article is about how to find out the desktop environment you are using in Linux. The editor thinks it is very practical, so share it with you as a reference and follow the editor to have a look.

Check which desktop environment you are using

You can use the echo command in Linux to display the value of the XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP variable in the terminal.

Open the terminal and copy and paste this command:

Echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP

For example, this indicates that I used the GNOME desktop in Ubuntu 20.04:

[email protected]: ~ $echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOPubuntu:GNOME

Although this command can quickly tell you which desktop environment you are using, it does not provide any other information.

In some cases, it may be important to understand the version of the desktop environment. Each new version of the software brings new features or removes some features. GNOME 3.36 introduced the do not Disturb option to turn off all desktop notifications.

Suppose you understand this new do not Disturb feature. You confirm that you are using GNOME, but you do not see this option on the GNOME desktop. This will be clear if you can check the desktop version of GNOME that has been installed on your system.

I will first show you the command to check the version of the desktop environment, because you can use it in any Linux running the desktop environment.

How to get the version of the desktop environment

Different from getting the name of the desktop environment. The method of getting its version number is not straightforward because it does not have standard commands or environment variables to provide this information.

One way to get information about the desktop environment in Linux is to use tools such as Screenfetch. This command-line tool displays the logo of the Linux distribution and some basic system information in ascii format. The desktop environment version is one of them.

In Ubuntu-based distributions, you can install Screenfetch by enabling the Universe repository, and then use the following command:

Sudo apt install screenfetch

For other Linux distributions, use the system's package manager to install this program.

After installation, just type screenfetch in the terminal, which should display the version of the desktop environment and other system information.

Check Desktop Environment Version

As shown in the figure above, my system uses GNOME 3.36.1 (the basic version is GNOME 3.36). You can also check the Linux kernel version and other details in this way.

Keep in mind that Screenfetch does not necessarily display the desktop environment version. I looked at its source code, and it has a lot of if-else code, and version information can be obtained from many sources and parameters in various desktop environments. If no version is found, only the desktop environment name is displayed.

Check the version of the desktop environment using GUI

Almost all desktop environments provide basic system details in their "Settings"-> "About" sections.

A major problem is that most desktop environments look different, so I can't show the exact steps of each desktop environment. I will show you GNOME's so that you can find it on the desktop.

Search for "Settings" in the menu (press Windows and search):

Search for Settings application

Here, find the "About" section at the bottom. Click it, and you should be able to see the desktop environment and its version.

Check Desktop Environment in Ubuntu

As you can see, this shows that my system is using GNOME 3.36.

Thank you for reading! This is the end of the article on "how to find out the desktop environment you use in Linux". I hope the above content can be of some help to you, so that you can learn more knowledge. if you think the article is good, you can share it for more people to see!

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