I want to get into Arch Linux, but I don't have that much experience and I feel like it'll be easier to set it up in a virtual machine rathen than dual booting, I've used Oracle VirtualBox before but it's very laggy. Are there any other VMs that aren't as laggy, or do I just have a hardware issue?
If your computer is a Linux, QEMU/KVM with libvirtd is great. If you run a Windows 10 or higher, HyperV works great, you should also be able to grab a VMware Player if it's still free. For Mac you have Parallels I believe.
Gnome Boxes is also great for simple stuff on Linux. Besides there is virt-manager as GUI for libvirt. On macOS UTM is a good free and open source tool.
I'd say VirtualBox is still your best bet b/c of its well-polished user interface - ie unless you plan to play games.
very laggy
Had you installed "extension pack" & "guest additions"? If not, please do! They make a world of difference.
Grab them for the version you've installed from VirtualBox downloads directory. Install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-x.y.z.vbox-extpack on your machine and VBoxGuestAdditions_x.y.z.iso on your VM.
Here's a decent guide on how to do it for an Ubuntu VM (instructions should apply to Arch too.) Since you'll be manually downloading guest-additions, just skip the "prerequisites" section.
An here's a guide on how to install the extension pack.
Pray, post here if you run into any troubles (you shouldn't ✌️.)
Desktop usage is almost always going to feel laggy in a VM because you don't have a real GPU inside the VM and it will fallback to some non-accelerated framebuffer mode. There are some GPU virtualization solutions, for example QEMU has virgl that offers 3D acceleration, but in my experience it's buggy/not ready and doesn't offer near bare metal performance.
The only way to get near bare metal graphical performance in a VM is by using PCI pass through of an entire GPU, but that requires an extra GPU, is non-trivial to setup and comes with a lot of caveats.
Dunno why are people spreading this myth... Arch is not that hard to install and you don't get a gold medal for installing it. I installed it with LXDE in an office machine, it only took me an hour.