If you want to ultimately go with Arch, which is a great choice by the way, you could try Manjaro Linux. It's technically still pre-release (zero dot version numbers), but it's fully functional and stable.
Some great things about it:
- it uses XFCE as standard, on Arch, so it's blazing fast, although it's also available in LXDE, MATE and Openbox versions, so if you appreciated the Gnome2 DM Ubuntu used when it was still good, maybe that's a good choice also.
- it has its own repos, so you don't have to deal with poisonous arch updates which are a fact of life in Arch, not in Manjaro, everything is tested beforehand before it's rolled out.
- it's also a rolling release distro like Arch.
- the Arch User Repositories and yaourt are fully supported, so you can get a crazy amount of applications.
- it runs Steam without having to solve problems all the time to get games working.
- you can easily switch kernels back and forth, to match what works best on your system, you can go all bleeding edge or you can keep it nice and conservative, depending on the hardware you use.
- the installer is easy to use, even though it's CLI based, but it's fully assisted, you don't have to actually use CLI commands to install, unlike Arch.
- the community behind it is really active and growing, and of course, being Arch based, it will directly benefit from the huge and great Arch community.
Things I don't like that much about it:
- there sometimes is a few days of lag for new features to come out in comparison to Arch because they have their own repos, and they don't have the manpower to solve some issues really fast. For example: an Arch update comes out which offers great new features, but it's also heavily poisonous. In such a case, after a few days you might get an update in Manjaro that offers most features bugfree, but there may be some features still blocked while they wait for the Arch community to iron out remaining bugs.
- from pre-release version to pre-release version, there is some inconsistency in GUI, API or default app choices, they will change apps for certain things, etc... probably to test out what is most liked before going official release, which is planned at the end of this year. This is no problem as a user, because it's a rolling release, so basically when you install Manjaro at a certain point in time, you don't have to install a later release, so you don't actually see these changes, because what's on your system stays there and is updated constantly, but if you install later pre-release versions of Manjaro for others after you've familiarised yourself with it, it's a bit of a pain, because you might have to rearrange some stuff to find your way back, like they would change the default mail application, they would omit conky, they would change the office apps that come pre-installed on the version image, they would drop PulseAudio and go all ALSA again, etc...
- there is quite a bit of documentation on the Manjaro forums, but a lot of how-to's are to be searched for on the Arch forums, and those are not really that nice for new users, so if you install Manjaro for others and they are new to Arch, it's really important to preconfigure everything that's possibly critical, like getting hardware to work that's not linux-friendly like wireless Canon all-in-ones or Epson consumer grade photo printers, nothing extraordinary though, it's been a commonly known fact that in consumer grade printers/scanners/all-in-ones, HP has perfect linux support, and the rest is iffy, but once it's a semi-pro or pro range printer/scanner (meaning the printer actually costs more than a replacement cartridge, not meaning really expensive printers), there is no problem at all, and long term support is actually the best of all PC platforms.