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.
How to get the GNOME version?
gnome
GNOME 3 version is stored in this file:/usr/share/gnome/gnome-version.xmlcontent (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)And no, you shouldn't use commands like gnome-session --version, gnome-shell --version, gdm --version etc. 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).