How To Install VSCodium on Debian 11

Hello, friends. It’s no secret that Visual Studio Code is one of the best text editors out there. However, there are many users who don’t like it because it is from Microsoft. Well, for them and for everyone, VSCodium on Debian is available for installation.

So, what is VSCodium?

According to the project website

VSCodium is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VS Code.

Now, what does this mean? What advantage does it bring us? Well, the project warns us that although Code is open source under the MIT license, its binaries are distributed under another license and include telemetry/tracking.

If you love Code, but you are also concerned about your privacy, you will find in VSCodium a great ally for your projects.

As it could not be otherwise, VSCodium is compatible with several systems such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. For the latter, it is available as a snap and through binaries.

Let’s go for it.

Install VSCodium on Debian 11

As the support is so good for Linux, we have many options.

The most recommended is to add the VSCodium repository to the system.

To achieve this, open a terminal and update the system

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Thereafter, you can install some necessary packages

sudo apt install dirmngr ca-certificates software-properties-common gnupg gnupg2 apt-transport-https curl

Then, download the GPG key from the repository and add it to the system

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

Then add the repository to the system:

echo 'deb [ 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

Refresh APT

sudo apt update

And now install VSCodium with the command line

sudo apt install codium

Now you can run it from the main menu

Other available methods…

There are many methods available to install VSCodium. One of them is to simply download the DEB package and install it manually.

This is interesting if you would rather not add any repositories to the system, but more recent versions will be released soon.

To download the DEB package, run

wget -c https://download.vscodium.com/debs/pool/main/c/codium/codium_1.72.1.22284_amd64.deb

And then install it with the command line.

sudo apt install ./codium_1.72.1.22284_amd64.deb

Remember that the command line will vary depending on the version. So, I recommend you to check it at this link

If you use Flatpak, then you can also download it from there without problems.

To achieve that, add the Flathub repository

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

And then install the tool

flatpak install flathub com.vscodium.codium

You can also run it from the main menu.

Conclusion

Privacy is important for many developers, but you have to admit that Code is a great editor. To solve this problem, VSCodium was born, so you can have the potential of Code but respecting your privacy. Today you learned how to install it.