@catch what im thinking is probably closer to what @geerlingguy very wisely suggested at the start of this thread.
ddev and lando are pretty feature rich and totally overkill for that "first spin up" experience so "alternative" is probably a strong word. im thinking more like a distillation or lowest common denominator. makes sense to me to provide the absolute minimum "official" tool and then as @elly points out people will move onto other things as they get their feet wet and discover what their needs actually are. Not sure i agree it would add more noise: "start with this, the official thing, when you're ready here are the power tools.". that seems like an improvement to what exists now.
if Drupal core doesnt want to maintain something like that, trust me, i get it. i'm just pointing out that its going to be hard for any generic third party dev tool to consistently solve this problem well for Drupal over time because things changes. Could end up not being a problem at all but could also be a big deal and i would hate to see Drupal get "PHANTOMJSed".
And yes obviously XAMMP should not be spoken of ever again.
"default" is definitely a better word than "official" but i think my point in #53 remains the same.
When we started Lando the overwhelming majority of our users were Drupal developers. Now they are one of many different groups and Lando has become a more generic development solution. We did not really anticipate that happening, or happening as quickly as it did but it did happen and these things do happen naturally, organically and by no ones fault in tech all the time. Things drift apart.
We come from Drupal, started Drupal companies, organized and sponsored Drupal events, love Drupal and have a vested personal interest in Drupal's success but even with that background Lando is not solely a Drupal development tool and as long as that is true it, or any other generic dev tool, is just not a good choice as an "official" or "default" solution because fundamentally these things are not trying to solve THIS PROBLEM but a different, sometimes aligned, sometimes adjacent, sometimes completely not related set of OTHER PROBLEMS.
The best way to solve THIS PROBLEM especially for the long haul is for Drupal to take ownership of it and solve it itself because its sort of the only thing that can do so well.
I agree with both @wells and @heatherwoz.
Any "official" solution here should be one that is actually/actively maintained by the core drupal team itself again a la Laravel Homestead. While I have a ton of faith in the work, mission, vibe and robust durability of @rfay dev tools, tech ecosystems, come and go, change, etc. There is not a sufficiently strong feedback loop and incentive alignment between ANY third party tool and Drupal itself to ensure with a reasonable probability that said tool is going to work well into the future.
I say this as a maintainer of a dev tool that 10,000+ drupal developers use every month and would feel the same way about a proposal suggesting that it become the official tool. To me this is not about the various merits of DDEV (of which there are many) vs some other thing but that a mission critical part of Drupal should not be handed over to any third party tool.