Visvanath Ratnaweera

Going from 4.1 to 4.2 the system software requirements were also raised. See http://www.syndrega.ch/blog/#php-and-dbms-compatibility-of-major-moodle-releases. The route > 3.9 LTS > 4.1 LTS would be safer, and 4.1 LTS is supported longer than the 4.2, which is not a LTS. Ref. https://moodledev.io/general/releases.

Before looking at the technology, the lurid headline overshot the factual issue. The general answer to the general question "Windows or Linux" is, it depends on the man behind the wheel. Only when you dig deeper, why is the (a particular) man is better in Windows than in Linux doing X, the differences (of your your specific situation) will come up. There are hard-core Window administrators who run huge Moodle clusters. But the vast majority of big Moodle clusters run Linux. FYI, all 500 of the Top 500 super computers in the world run Linux or a variant of it. But then, that is completely irrelevant to your 50 users who experience 500 HTTP 500 errors on a Windows cluster totaling 24 core, 80 GB RAM. I challenge to run the same load on a Raspberry Pi - sans the HTTP 500 error. But then again, I see that your are not a hard-core Window admin. Otherwise you won't swap you present architecture to XAMPP that quickly. (You knew that XAMPP is not meant for serious production servers?) Obviously you are no Linux veteran either: It is Linux, not Linuix!

I think, you asked the wrong question: It is not Windows or Linux, rather "How do I host my Moodle?" That is pretty individual. There are many, many past discussions and advise in this forum and the Installing and Upgrading form. Have a look first. Make use of the excellent forum search.

Well, the zip file is not a one-to-one replacement. You can't update/upgrade Moodle, or merge your source changes, etc. as elegantly as in Git. There are various ways of giving proxy as parameter to the Git command. Search the web and experiment. Also talk to your organization's network administrators.

> The issue was when I tried to compile the library following this documentation -> https://docs.moodle.org/401/en/admin/environment/php_extension/curl,

The document also says, "These steps should work on Debian 7.0 (although you may need to install sudo) and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS - if you're using something older you will need to upgrade. Please also note that these steps use the php5-* packages, as that's what many of the package manager repositories use. Ideally you should be using PHP 7.1, or at least PHP 7. More information about that at Moodle and PHP7. If you are using PHP7 or 7.1 it may be possible to substitute the php5-* packages with php7-* or php7.1-* depending on how you installed PHP." It is old! Somebody needs the update the document.

Whatever, for all I can see, this discussion is about installing Moodle, better suited for the Installing and upgrading forum.