The hardest part will probably be setting up the wireless connection, and getting the WM set up. Do you think arch is suitable for a relative beginner?
By the way, setting up wireless in the install process usually only consists of running wifi-menu, and a WM is as simple as `pacman -S i3` (or which ever wm you want) and launching it from the DM or .xinitrc. ;)
Another advantage of starting from a bare install like arch, or a trimmed down version of another distro, is that you get a feel for how the system is held together (what software is installed, how the disks are partitioned, etc.). Sometimes comes in handy if you need to debug something!
Arch has turned out, surprisingly to be much easier to maintain, since things are well documented and consistent.
Agreed. I've moved all my private servers [1] to Arch, despite everyone warning that it will break all the time, and I've never experienced any sort of breakage (except when I did stupid things myself).
[1] Currently, there are three: one physical machine as a homeserver, and two VPS for public services.
It was a big help to get more into i3. It also includes a lot of helper scripts. I used them in the beginning to get things done and later switched over to the "real" commands. inst -> pacman is an example for that.
Also, since there are a lot of standard steps involved, I recommend that you document what you're doing, either as a plain text file of notes, or as some sort of configuration management playbook/recipe/template. I started doing that two years ago and it really took the pain out of bringing up new Arch systems, or reinstalling existing ones: https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration
Reduce as many variables as you can while getting started, and running ubuntu is certainly a great way of doing that. Plus, a lot of shops run ubuntu in production, which makes that experience pretty valuable. Good luck!