FYI Muun wallet is not a real lightning wallet. It uses submarine swaps and batches transactions on chain. It's cheaper than transacting on chain, but more much more expensive than lightning.

Both parties definitely do need to have a node online to transact with Lightning (if you are not doing it then someone else is running that node for you like with Phoenix or Breez. That means you're trusting them and they also have vision into all your transactions)

Fair, but if security and privacy don't matter to you, and you prefer convenience and usability, why not just use Paypal, Cashapp, Venmo, etc for spending? Way more people use and accept those than lightning too.

-Onramp to Monero directly with fiat noKYC and P2P using LocalMonero.

-Buy it using Bisq - Monero is their largest volume trades by far after Bitcoin.

-Simply swap Bitcoin or another crypto for it using a swap aggregators like trocador.app

-Buy at big exchanges like Kraken if you must, but I don't recommend since they require KYC. But at least once you withdraw they lose the trail similar to withdrawing cash from an ATM.

You can constantly swap back and forth if you want, but I don't do that and wouldn't recommend doing that bc its bad for privacy and also would be expensive to do that all the time.

Only buy the amount of Monero you're planning to use over X amount of time you're comfortable with (just say 3 months worth). The timeline you hold Monero is too short and the amounts are too small to be significant vs long term price action of BTC. For example, all of 2022 if you held Monero instead of Bitcoin during that year you would've made ~2.5x more. I'm not saying to do this, but just an example that these timelines are too short to matter.

Places to use Monero directly:

monerica.com (massive directory)

kycnot.me/?type=service

moneromarket.io

And freenet markets of course

Giftcards and virtual debit cards:

coincards.com

buy.cakepay.com

stealths.net