I just made my first Lightning payment from my own node (and opened my first channel with Stacker.news)!
Using Umbrel + Ride the Lightning. Not nearly as difficult as I thought. I have connected my node to Zeus wallet as well.
The only issue I encountered when testing payments on Ride the Lightning was the need for a "max-fee" to be set, which was not available on the dashboard payment widget, but which can be found under "Advanced Settings".
I'm really excited about Lightning. I still have a lot of things to learn to be able to comfortably use this with larger amounts and make sure I am doing things properly.
But overall, I had been led to believe that it was hard to setup Lightning nodes, but it was pretty straight forward I thought.