I want to learn but dont know where to start with lightning. I am very experienced using bitcoin traditionally, and have done plenty of transactions using electrum, but never used lightning.
Since you are already familiar with Electrum, go on Channels, Open channel, choose size and fee, Send transaction, wait conf, done. You can send lightning transactions. My pleasure :)
Lightning has much better privacy by default than regular on-chain transactions and is much cheaper! I would recommend getting the Phoenix by ACINQ and swapping on-chain Bitcoin for LN Bitcoin using Boltz
https://boltz.exchange/
People generally put less Bitcoin into Lightning compared to their savings since Lightning needs hot wallets to work behind the scenes, but it works best for everyday payments
Phoenix has swaps built into the application itself. The tradeoff is that they aren't trustless since you pay ACINQ and then they do the swap, the benefit is that ACINQ doesn't charge a fee (besides the mining fee), whereas Boltz charges 0.5%-ish.
I chose builder, but i'm also a new builder and still learning so those too. IF anyone has great resources for starting out in lightning dev I'd appreciate the links :)
It'll get you up to speed on all the high level technical workings of the Lightning Network and acts as a good transition to the BOLTs
https://github.com/lightning/bolts
How about just user. Run your own node (contribute to security) and Lightning node as well. It makes you learn about the technology and you contribute at the same time. Not to mention it makes you feel kinda independent and "be your own bank" is very real. YMMV