VSCodium is an offshoot of Microsoft’s popular Visual Studio Code editor. It’s exactly the same as VS Code, except that VSCodium doesn’t track your usage.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is an excellent editor, not only for Web developers, but also for other programmers. Because of its capabilities, it is considered one of the best open source editors.

Yes, it’s one of Microsoft’s many open source products. You can easily install Visual Studio Code on Linux because there are binaries in the form of DEB, RPM, and Snap packages.

But there is a problem with it that may not be a problem for the average user, but is important to the open source purist.

Microsoft says the binaries provided are not open source.

Confused? Let me explain.

VS Code’s source Code is open source under an MIT license. You can access it on GitHub. However, the installation created by Microsoft includes proprietary trackers.

This trace is basically used to collect usage data and send it to Microsoft to “help improve their products and services.” Remote reporting is common in software products today. Even Ubuntu does this, but it’s more transparent.

You can disable remote reporting in VS Code, but can you trust Microsoft completely? If the answer is no, what are your options?

You can build it from source and keep it all open source. But installing from source isn’t always the best option these days, because we’re used to working with binaries.

Another option is to use VSCodium!

VSCodium: 100% open source Visual Studio Code

VSCodium is a branch of Microsoft Visual Studio Code. The sole purpose of this project is to provide you with off-the-shelf binaries without Microsoft’s remote collection code.

This solves the problem where you want to use VS Code without Microsoft proprietary Code, but you’re not used to building it from source.

Since VSCodium is a branch of VS Code, it looks and functions exactly the same as VS Code.

This is a screenshot of VS Code and VSCodium running for the first time in Ubuntu. Can you tell the difference?

If you can’t tell the two apart, take a look below.

In addition, the logos of the two apps have no other obvious differences.

Install VSCodium on Linux

While VSCodium exists in some distributions, such as Parrot OS, you must add additional repositories to other Linux distributions.

On Ubuntu and Debian based distributions, you can install VSCodium using the following command.

First, add the GPG key for the warehouse:

wget -qO - https://gitlab.com/paulcarroty/vscodium-deb-rpm-repo/raw/master/pub.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
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Then add the repository:

echo 'deb https://gitlab.com/paulcarroty/vscodium-deb-rpm-repo/raw/repos/debs/ vscodium main' | sudo tee --append /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscodium.list
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Now update your system and install VSCodium:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install codium
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You can find installation instructions for other distributions on its page. You should also read the instructions for migrating from VS Code to VSCodium.

What do you think of VSCodium?

Personally, I like the concept of VSCodium. To put it trite, it started out with good intentions. I think Linux distributions committed to open source may even start to include it in official repositories.

What do you think? Is it worth switching to VSCodium or do you choose to turn off remote reporting and continue using VS Code?

Please do not appear “I use Vim” comments 😀

via: itsfoss.com/vscodium/

By Abhishek Prakash (Lujun9972

This article is originally compiled by LCTT and released in Linux China