I don't think this is good advice. If I switched to Windows, it would take me significantly longer to get my environment setup in a way that is useful to me. I'

I don't think this is good advice. If I switched to Windows, it would take me significantly longer to get my environment setup in a way that is useful to me. I'm spending more time tweaking my environment than actually coding. At the company I work for, we have people on Windows, and we have people on OSX. We've never had a problem with it. Our build scripts are agnostic because we deploy to Linux anyways. If someone doesn't have a piece of software on a specific OS, we just run it on a VM. I just can't think of a good reason to why you would need to switch to Windows in a PHP environment. I think it might be understandable if you work on a platform that forces you to run a specific operating system (like specific game engines), but I doubt he'll have any issues doing PHP dev on a Linux machine and switching to a different OS is just going to slow him down. I assume the reason the company is not allowing you to run on metal is so they can install company software to monitor and install software updates on your machine, not because of the development environment associated with PHP. I wouldn't switch my OS for a company unless the work absolutely requires it. My environment is highly automated for OSX and I can get up and running in under an hour. All my software is installed automatically, I have set directories where websites live and nginx is already configured to run from those directories.