Laravel assets return 404 on localhost

I am pretty new to Laravel. I use Ubuntu and cloned an app from GitHub on home folder. When I run the app with php artisan serve I don't see the page styled. Ctrl-u shows the source with no problem but I have 404 errors in the console regarding everything under the asset folder. console warnings can be seen here

my 000_default.conf file is

/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-defult.conf                 
<VirtualHost *:80>

        ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
        DocumentRoot ~/_/www/easymove/public

        <Directory />
                Options FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride None
        </Directory>
        <Directory /var/www/laravel>
                AllowOverride All
        </Directory>

        ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
        CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

</VirtualHost>

Contents of the webpack.mix.js at the app root are as follows:

const mix = require('laravel-mix');

/*
 |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
 | Mix Asset Management
 |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
 |
 | Mix provides a clean, fluent API for defining some Webpack build steps
 | for your Laravel application. By default, we are compiling the Sass
 | file for the application as well as bundling up all the JS files.
 |
 */

mix.js('resources/js/app.js', 'public/js')
   .sass('resources/sass/app.scss', 'public/css');

via Chebli Mohamed