It depends on your hourly rate and availability. Debian is one of the oldest distributions, stable, binary packages. You can install and get to work. If you need latest packages, you can run the testing version (or Kali Linux)

Arch is a Gentoo light experience, from what I understand. I used Gentoo when I was a student, but now have no time to fiddle with operating system compilation for 3 days and use Debian or Debian based.