I had my fair share of troubles with umbrelOS too. Running on a rather old cpu (dualcore-i3) it was also extremly slow and laggy. Works a lot smoother since I did the last update a couple of days ago. I'll see how long that lasts.

Ubuntu will also work of course, it's a little more work to hack all those commands into your keyboard and keep everything up to date, while you just have to click some buttons and wait in umbrel.

I'm always running electrs in between my BTC- and LN-node, need it for my SPV-clients anyway, but it should work without too.

To lower you initial costs you can save a lot on fees by batch-opening multiple channels in one on-chain-Tx, using tools like BoS, or LNDg.

I could also open up a channel to get you some inbound liquidity and maybe send some sats thru it to pay for your first outbound-channels and get you started.

Just gimme a wink when you're ready.