alt Hacker News> Protip, if you have access to the computer: `lsb_release -a` should list both release and codename. This command is not specific to Ubuntu.
I typically prefer
cat /etc/os-release
That's only if the distro is recent enough; sooner or later, you'll encounter a box running a distro version from before /etc/os-release became the standard, and you'll have to look for the older distro-specific files like /etc/debian_version.