XAMPP vs. Native LAMP Packages

Solution 1:

I'd definitely choose for the packages provided by Ubuntu (if that's what you mean by "native"). LAMPP is more bloated in my opinion since it includes everything you do not need. It was designed to work on most Linux distributions and therefore might not be that optimized as the native ones. On windows, you had no package manager which took care of updating your software so XAMPP would be the most logical solution if you do not want to spend some time on configuring Apache, MySQL and PHP.

An advantage of using Ubuntu packages is that you do not have to wait for the XAMPP developers to deploy a new package if one of the components is outdated. Simply open your package manager and update your packages, add/ remove individual component, restart the webserver and you're done.