The closer your local environment imitates production the less likely to run into problems when pushing code from one to the other. MariaDB supports the same syntax and features as MySQL with some exceptions based on the version of MariaDB being used. Though I don’t think you’re likely to run into any of those exceptions. As a general rule of thumb best practice is to imitate production as close as possible locally. Most of the time you can get by fine running things like XAMP but in larger projects that have a lot of dependencies XAMP alone can provide a drastic misrepresentation of the production server.