LaTeX has a ton of different flavors, releases, and installations: MacTeX, MiKTeX, TeXworks, XeTeX, pdfTeX, LuaTeX… If you’re using Linux and just want to edit LaTeX files in Visual Studio Code and have them automatically rendered as PDFs, follow these instructions:

1. On Arch-based distros, install the packages listed here. On Debian-based systems, sudo apt install texlive.

2. Install some Perl dependencies:

   sudo cpan Log::Log4perl Log::LogDispatch Log::Dispatch::File YAML::Tiny File::HomeDir
   

3. If you want to use FontAwesome on Arch-based systems, install the oft-font-awesome package and then do the following (source):

   sudo ln -s /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/09-texlive-fonts.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/09-texlive-fonts.conf
   fc-cache && mkfontscale && mkfontdir
   

   On Debian-based systems, install the font package with apt:

   sudo apt install texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-fonts-extra
   

4. Install the VS Code extension called “LaTeX Workshop”.

5. If you want to use the fontspec package and get an error saying that “the fontspec package requires either XeTeX or LuaTex”, add the magic command % !TEX program = xelatex to the top of your .tex file.

6. If your installation needed to add some paths to your PATH but VS Code isn’t seeing them, try opening VS Code from the shell (with code path/to/workspace) so that it inherits $PATH from the interactive shell. (There might be a way to change the bin path in the settings for LaTeX Workshop, but I haven’t needed to find that setting yet.)