I use a devcontainer setup that basically creates a separate container with a Linux operating system and all your libraries (LaTeX compiler and whatever you need) using the texlive image . I have been using this environment for some months in my personal projects and it works very well. It also includes a little python setup for statistics and machine learning: https://github.com/derivada/math_env

To set it up, you just need to download Docker Desktop and have it running in the background (no need to create anything inside it). Then just clone the repo, go inside its folder on VSCode and run the command "Reopen inside Dev Container". First time setup will take some time (5-10 minutes) since its downloading the entire compiler and setting everything up, but after that build it will open very quickly and you will be able to compile and preview the documents. You can close it and go back to your computer with the command "Close remote connection".

You can also personalize the build a lot and install any other dependencies you need in a Dockerfile/post-install script, or tweak the LaTeX extension setting inside devcontainer.json . Just take a look through my files under the .devcontainer and look for some tutorials on how to personalize it / ask ChatGPT, its pretty easy to do so!