What Operating Systems Support Visual Studio Code?

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a highly versatile, free, and open-source code editor developed by Microsoft. To ensure optimal performance and security, Microsoft officially supports VS Code on specific versions of Windows, macOS, and Linux. This article provides a direct and comprehensive breakdown of the officially supported operating systems, versions, and architectures required to run Visual Studio Code.

Windows

Visual Studio Code is fully supported on the following Windows versions: * Windows 10 (Home, Pro, Enterprise, and Education) * Windows 11 (Home, Pro, Enterprise, and Education) * Windows Server 2016, 2019, and 2022

Supported Architectures: * x64 (64-bit) * x86 (32-bit) * ARM64

Note: Older versions of Windows, such as Windows 7, 8, and 8.1, are no longer officially supported by current versions of VS Code.

macOS

For Apple users, Visual Studio Code supports the latest releases of macOS. The minimum requirement is: * macOS 10.15 (Catalina) and newer

Supported Architectures: * Intel (64-bit) * Apple Silicon (M1, M2, and M3 series chips)

VS Code offers a “Universal” installer that contains binaries for both Intel and Apple Silicon architectures, ensuring native execution on all modern Macs.

Linux

Visual Studio Code officially supports a wide variety of Linux distributions. The primary formats provided are .deb (for Debian-based systems) and .rpm (for Red Hat-based systems).

Supported Distributions: * Ubuntu (18.04 and newer) * Debian (9 and newer) * Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) (8 and newer) * Fedora (36 and newer) * SUSE / openSUSE

Supported Architectures: * x64 (64-bit) * ARM32 * ARM64

In addition to standard package managers, VS Code is officially available on Linux as a Snap package and via Flatpak (community-maintained, but widely used).