I had this dilemma while back. I decided to suck it up and learn Ruby and Rails. I now realized that I hate PHP and have used rails, django, and play for all of my web applications and have not looked back.
If you are in a learning mood, I'd say go with rails.
If Windows 8.1 gets rid of you having to use metro, it will be awesome. I like everything about windows 8 minus the metro part, which is were almost all of the windows 8 complaints go. Hopefully Microsoft will deliver.
I am a soon to be college grad and am currently going through the hiring process at many companies. This article is pretty in line with what I have been seeing so far.