I'm working at a PHP shop that also uses Windows and we've had a python developer with a strong linux background come in and make the same transition.
I'd strongly just using windows for the first month or two. Which would you rather spend time on? PHP (the code you're being paid to build/support) or getting Arch Linux set up and working seamlessly on your machine. Besides you'll probably be running your PHP in a vm anyway. Also I'd suggest checking out fiddler, which is windows freeware.
PHP is a fairly sane language especially if you're using something like Laravel which is very similar to Rails. That said be prepared to run into some PHP oddities. One of them is that PHP will die with uncatchable fatal errors if there is a syntax error. PHP -l is a linter that should catch that. Also it's worth knowing that PHP is a wrapper over C, and really moved to OO in 5.3 so some build in functions will return an error code or true /false instead of throwing an exception
I'd strongly just using windows for the first month or two. Which would you rather spend time on? PHP (the code you're being paid to build/support) or getting Arch Linux set up and working seamlessly on your machine. Besides you'll probably be running your PHP in a vm anyway. Also I'd suggest checking out fiddler, which is windows freeware.
PHP is a fairly sane language especially if you're using something like Laravel which is very similar to Rails. That said be prepared to run into some PHP oddities. One of them is that PHP will die with uncatchable fatal errors if there is a syntax error. PHP -l is a linter that should catch that. Also it's worth knowing that PHP is a wrapper over C, and really moved to OO in 5.3 so some build in functions will return an error code or true /false instead of throwing an exception