Good to see Microsoft having 100 plus open source projects out there!
Python Tools for Visual Studio is one of Microsoft's "best kept secrets" is how I describe it. I would say they're both exactly well-built solutions. If you have Visual Studio I highly recommend you give it a shot, it's really well defined in my opinion. It also has a plethora of features[1]. However, when I'm on Linux I usually use PyCharm.
Or is Visual Studio Code the philosophical successor to Visual Studio? Anyone familiar enough with Microsoft to elaborate?
Visual Studio Code is a completely different product that happens to (confusingly!) share the same name.
But there are also some annoying VM freezings related to the USB port, which sometimes forces me to force quite the VM with the task manager because even VirtualBox can't terminate the instance.