In general (on Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora and Debian) I found os-details more useful. We should use lsb_release as a fallback instead. To quote the first link in the section above:

> There's already the lsb_release tool for this, why don't you just use that? Well, it's a very strange interface: a shell script you have to invoke ... and it's not written to be extensible. It's an optional package in many distributions ... The lsb_release tool to us appears to be an attempt of abstracting distribution checks, where standardization of distribution checks is needed. It's simply a badly designed interface. In our opinion, it has its use as an interface to determine the LSB version itself, but not for checking the distribution or version.