Lubuntu & LAMP server? [duplicate]

Yes you can! To install the most basic LAMP stack on Ubuntu you can do the following:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install apache2 mysql-server php libapache2-mod-php

You might want depending on your configuration to install other packages too to get everything running but that depends on what you need and you should read up on that in the official Ubuntu documentation for servers.

Another words before you now go and download your preferred Ubuntu installation image. If you're going to have that as a production system you should aim for the LTS releases which are all in all more carefully tested and provide longer support.

Installing on a desktop system is the same as if you would install it on a server system. So Lubuntu and other flavors work as well beside the server images.

Beside that take a bit of time and don't be afraid of the terminal, its usually the fastest way to solve things and to give advice too, no need to explain where to click and which tab to choose etc., this will all be past if you embrace it. And up to that there are plenty of resources around where you can read up. And welcome to the Linux world.

The short answer is: Yes, you can replace Windows + WAMP with Linux + LAMP.

Something more. I'm Windows user since the version 3.11 was launched in the early 1990s. About two years ago, I discovered the infinite freedom of Linux and especially of Ubuntu. For example, recently I created a set of scripts, related to my Apache server's security. It's not something significant, but it works, and the fact is I'm not able to create something similar within Windows, despite my experience there.

My advice is to use the native LAMP stack of Ubuntu, as @Videonauth suggested, and don't waste your time with third party stacks as XAMPP.

I would create at least three partitions: 1) one for swap that should be equal or double of the physical RAM; 2) one for the OS (Lubuntu); and 3) one for backup. Then you could use any tool as Clonezilla to create backup copies of the OS's partition when trying something new. (For this purpose also LVM^{[1] [2]} could be applied, but you should take a little experience before that.)

Lubuntu is nice choice to run an old computer with modern operation system ^{[3] [4]}. I've installed 16.04 on IBM R40 with 1GHz single core Intel Celeron, 768 MB of RAM and video card with shared memory - of course it can't play HD videos from YouTube, but it can play without any problem two (avi|mkv) movies on two displays.