Nobbie wrote:Xampp is (to put it nastily) made for the clueless. Xampp is not a professional environment for online providers, but a foolproof preconfigured installation for people without IT knowledge.
What you are looking for sounds to me more like a high performance, professional, highly configurable environment in the MS Azure world. That's pretty much the diametric opposite of what Xampp wants to be.
Why don't you install Apache, PHP and MariaDB (or MySQL) individually and configure them the way you need? You are free to choose the settings, free to choose the location, free to choose the infrastructure, free to choose the components and free to run updates. You can even update individual tools. Xampp does not offer all that, Xampp is not updateable, Xampp is bound to fixed structures, Xampp is badly free configurable. This is the price for the simple installation procedure. But you are surely not interested in a simple installation procedure, but in a powerful online environment. And that's exactly what you don't get with Xampp.
You ask a great question about setting up and refining my own environment. First, while you are right I could install Linux, PHP, Apache, MySQL, Ruby, etc., it is more an issue of time and effort.
I am not looking for something that is the professional, high performance, high maintenance technical stack, rather, something that works reasonably well, decent performance, and doesn't take a huge amount of time and effort to maintain. I'm just looking for something that is reasonably stable and with decent performance, not at the edge of technical capabilities or requiring huge amounts of time to maintain. My billable time is more important than that.
However, thank you all for the feedback! It has been very, very helpful.