VSCodium your FOSS IDE

A huge majority of developers or people learning to code use VSCode from Microsoft. It’s a great product and the list of plugins to extend its features is very long. However, as people are becoming more and more aware of how important their privacy is and pushing back against tools that lean towards AI training on your data, the IDE has to come under scrutiny. Built into VSCode there are a heap of binary code files, code that we the general public aren’t privy to despite the core product being open source itself. These binaries send all kinds of telemetry and data back to MS head office, so while we have to have faith that it’s being used to improve the product, the truth is we don’t know without some serious reverse engineering.

So what can we do about this? We could swap IDE….. but VSCode is so familiar and the plugin ecosystem is so good we could end up making things harder for ourselves. Well my FOSS friends, I have good news for you! Let me introduce you to VSCodium! This is a binary free build of the open source VSCode project, without the custom product.json settings that add all the reporting features but which retains the MIT License part. Basically, it is the same apart from no binaries and there’s a slightly different extension/plugin store, but more about that later.

The best news is you can do everything you could before, without changing your work flow and without being tracked by mega corps!

Installing VSCodium

The install is super easy from the desktop. If you have Pi Apps installed, you can go ahead and install it from the package list there. If not, just open up your terminal and follow these commands.

First of all become root:

sudo su -p

Now we’ll add the GPG key of the repository, this is to authenticate the packages we download to make sure they haven’t been tampered with:

wget -qO - https://gitlab.com/paulcarroty/vscodium-deb-rpm-repo/raw/master/pub.gpg \
    | gpg --dearmor \
    | sudo dd of=/usr/share/keyrings/vscodium-archive-keyring.gpg

Now we tell apt about the repository by adding it to the list:

echo 'deb [arch=amd64,arm64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/vscodium-archive-keyring.gpg] https://download.vscodium.com/debs vscodium main' \
    | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscodium.list

We’ll now update the apt cache then install vscodium:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install codium

That’s a wrap!

That’s it! You can now head to the Raspberry Pi menu and programming and you’ll get the vscodium logo there ready for you to run.

What about plugins?

I did say I’d tell you about plugins. All the plugins you get for VSCode will work with VSCodium, but because of the MS terms and conditions you can’t download them from the MS store. Instead, VSCodium uses something called OpenVSX (more info here) and most plugins are (and I haven’t found one yet that wasn’t) available in both the MS store and OpenVSX. If the plugin isn’t in OpenVSX, you can reach out to the developer and ask them to upload as there’s very little they have to do, if they supply the plugin on github just download and install as normal!

Conclusion

To be honest this is a really simple swap, I can’t see why you wouldn’t use this. Remember - you are not a product to be data mined in order to make more money for M$!

Make the switch and keep productive while avoiding all those beady eyes watching your every move 👀.

Pro’s

• No tracking
• A familiar environment
• Plugin compatible

Con’s

• Some plugins may not be in the OpenVSX store (but this is rare)
• Honestly, I can’t find any other fault

PiSource Score