VSCodium

VSCodium at a glance

VSCodium is a community-maintained build of the open-source VS Code source code, distributed without Microsoft's branding, telemetry, and proprietary licensing terms. System administrators and developers use it as a free, MIT-licensed alternative to Visual Studio Code, particularly in environments with strict privacy or compliance requirements, or in Linux distributions that avoid shipping proprietary software in their repositories.

Because VSCodium is built directly from the public VS Code source, its releases generally track the upstream release cadence closely, typically following shortly after each official VS Code release. New versions therefore appear at fairly short intervals and bundle both feature updates and security fixes inherited from the upstream project.

When updating, administrators should note that extensions must be sourced from an alternative marketplace rather than the official Visual Studio Code Marketplace, since the latter's terms of use prohibit access from non-Microsoft builds. Additionally, teams relying on custom build or packaging pipelines should verify that automated update mechanisms remain compatible with the chosen distribution format (binary package, Flatpak, Snap) to avoid version mismatches.