Seed phrase, password, address, public key, private key, master public key..Wth!

[o_e_l_e_o]

I think a lot of your confusion is coming from the language being used.

When someone says "You need to keep your private keys safe because you use them to sign transactions", they don't mean you physically. You don't need to write down your private keys, don't need to back them up individually, don't even need to look at them. You don't need to know what they look like, or how they sign transactions. Your wallet deals with all that.

When some one says "You use public keys to generate addresses", again, they don't mean you. Your wallet generates the public keys from private keys, generates the addresses from public keys, stores them and uses them. You never even need to look at them.

What you need is the following:

The Electrum file and the password which will let you open it in Electrum.

Your 12 word seed phrase backed up on paper, which will let you recover your wallet should you lose either the file or the password we just mentioned.

At least one address from that wallet which you can send bitcoin to.

If you have all those things, and keep them safe, then you are inherently backing up and keeping safe your private keys and public keys without having to think about them. I can't remember the last time I actually looked at or manually used one of my private keys - that's what the wallet software is for.

[swordsrkewl]

Under the receive tab, the first box is description, what is this for, to just label the transaction?

The main way you get the address is to click the "New Address box", which has three tabs, Address(hfeh38yra8wyrav84hntaehe), Request(bitcoin:hfeh38yra8wyrav84hntaehe) and QR Code.... This is where we want the btc to go right? the description box can be left blank, or what?

How long shoulda transaction be valid, long enough for it to complete I would assume? What are the fees and times liek right now? Like the very minimum fees time for transactions?

[NotATether]

Under the receive tab, the first box is description, what is this for, to just label the transaction?

The main way you get the address is to click the "New Address box", which has three tabs, Address(hfeh38yra8wyrav84hntaehe), Request(bitcoin:hfeh38yra8wyrav84hntaehe) and QR Code.... This is where we want the btc to go right? the description box can be left blank, or what?

How long shoulda transaction be valid, long enough for it to complete I would assume? What are the fees and times liek right now? Like the very minimum fees time for transactions?

The description box is optional, it is only to label the payment request and can be left blank.

When you open the "Receive" tab, it selects one of your bitcoin addresses for you to copy. Then you type an amount, and press the Request button after that. At this point the three tabs you mentioned (Address, Request, and QR code) will be filled in, and you click on the blue clipboard button to copy one of them, and transmit it to the person you want to pay you.

Electrum will usually guess the optimal fee for confirming your transaction in a reasonable amount of time while also keeping the fee low, but you can move the slider towards the left to use even lower fees if you are OK with waiting for it to be confirmed after several more blocks.

[o_e_l_e_o]

When you open the "Receive" tab, it selects one of your bitcoin addresses for you to copy.

Just to clarify: It selects the next unused address in your wallet.

How long shoulda transaction be valid, long enough for it to complete I would assume?

The "Expires after" selection is irrelevant to the person sending you coins, and can be ignored if you want. It is an internal function of Electrum only, designed to alert you if a transaction does not complete in the time you have set. This might be useful if you want paid a set amount of fiat, and so if they don't pay with an hour (for example) you would want to to update to a new bitcoin price to reflect any price changes in that time. Even if your transaction request has expired, though, the QR code will still scan just fine and any transactions sent will still process normally.

What are the fees and times liek right now? Like the very minimum fees time for transactions?

The very minimum fee is always 1 sat/vbyte, but will vary widely in how long that takes to confirm. Right now, a reasonable fee is sitting around 50 sats/vbyte. Use this site for an easy estimation: https://mempool.space/