I’m sure someone out there is using it, but everyone I know now uses Docker. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but there’s a lot of documentation out there now too. More on reddit.com

First a bit of history. Back when I started out learning how to setup servers, I remember XAMPP being promoted as the beginner-friendly alternative to setting up your own servers. I think I even tried it out a few times, but the nerds, at the time — those hanging out on the forums — was advising people to install servers manually, since they would learn more, so that was what I did. This was before the time of social media FYI, so the tone was very rough on these forums — if you asked a question before Googling and doing your homework, you would be crushed! Last time I tried XAMPP I actually found it to be confusing and complicated, since stuff was stored in non-standard locations. Etc. In the end I gave up and just installed Apache + MySQL + PHP the old fashioned way, and I find that works very well for me. You got to remember, in Ubuntu at least, it is just a simple matter of running: sudo apt install apache2 PHP8.0 mysql-server php8.0-fpm It is extremely easy to setup, and the location of configuration files is very intuitive once you get used to Linux. Even setting up Let's Encrypt is a matter of typing a few commands in terminal. I do not think it can get much easier than that. More on reddit.com

Xampp ecosystem bloats your machine with runtimes which is generally discouraged. One of your clients may rely on Redis, other one may rely on Hazelcast, another one may rely on Memcached. You may get a great deal for developing a Wordpress plugin that has to work on PHP 5.2 but your side project has to be blazing fast and you would rely on PHP 7.0. With vagrant you can create two boxes, spin up the one you want to work and that's it. With Xampp, good luck. You need to rely on whatever Xampp bundle brings to you. You won't be able to configure and install another database application or rely on HVVM since Xammp doesn't work that way. You end up downloading a setup.exe and if your project requires something else, you need to install and configure them by hand. You will enter project's website, try to find the download button, click on it, click on setup.exe and restart your computer because Windows tells you to do so. In the end, you will be tightly coupled to your computer which isn't a good thing. Xampp runs on Windows environment so you need to know about the drawbacks. Ideally you want to mimic your production environment so issues caused by the OS differences can be caught during development and not when they reach production. As you grow better, you may work on bigger projects where you work alongside collaborators. You can't tell them to install Xammp, then Redis, then Supervisord and loads of different tools. What if one of the tools in your stack doesn't work on Windows that is crucial for development? Not to mention, installations almost never works properly on Windows environment. I had to change Skype's port each time I had to launch Xammp because both of them worked on port 80. It is one of the most obvious cases. What if your collaborator can't install a specific tool on Windows just because he has a messed up Windows registry and spend hours trying to solve it with zero Google results about the error message? Should he format his computer and re-install Windows? Oh, wait. Before he formats his computer he has to backup his wedding photos into USB. With vagrant I can easily destroy and provision my box in minutes. While it reinstalls my vagrant box, I can switch back to Skyrim and play it until it's done. Using vagrant or provision tools isn't hard or takes time to learn. Xammp is a good bundle, but how is that any better than https://puphpet.com/ ? You can tick whatever you want and that's it. It is thousand times more flexible than relying on whatever Xampp has in the bundle, plus open source. You should always familiarize yourself with unix environments and CLI. I regret not doing it sooner. A web developer without CLI skills will never be great regardless of his skills. A web developer has to know how Nginx/PHP7/FPM works together, has to be able to configure at least a basic VPS via terminal. Can I switch back to Xampp? Yes. Would it boot faster than Homestead for me? Yes. Do I want to go through installing Xampp/Redis/Grunt/Gulp/NPM/Ruby/Gem/Python/Git/NodeJS/Composer/Beanstalkd/Supervisord/Sass all by hand? Never. As long as your app has no other dependencies other than a webserver/a RDBMS/PHP and if you're certain your app will never require additional dependencies, then you can rely on Xampp as long as you're aware of the drawbacks. More on reddit.com

First thing check if XAMPP removed everything, not only itself. ( check default xampp directory). Second thing - check in processes if there is only one Apache process. More on reddit.com