Arch is worth it & easier than you think- been using it on various machines for 3+ years.

Once you have a good amount of experience with Linux (i.e. once you're comfortable tinkering with random things and have a good amount of intuition) I'd recommend going for Qubes if your machine is strong enough & you care a lot about security.

Side note: The default XFCE desktop environment sucks in my opinion, I always replace it with KDE or i3 or dwm. KDE works best with some tiling extensions if that's your thing, as you can use activities in conjunction with workspaces to really isolate different workflows. I'm usually a WM-only kind of guy, but the activity+workspace combo has kept me on KDE when using Qubes.

Also, be sure to install 4.2 alpha rather than 4.1. It's perfectly stable and dom0 will be much more modern. Don't play around with guiVMs, they are very hit-or-miss depending on hardware and not something you should try until you're very familiar with Qubes.