The question is this: if your distribution already provides a working kernel, and the battery life and performance are acceptable, why waste your time recompiling a new kernel?

Compiling your Linux kernel used to be mandatory, precisely because Linux was so fast moving and because hardware management was poor. This is (mostly) not the case anymore.

Use the kernel provided by your distribution, and let them worry about updating testing and securing it.

I say this as someone who used to compile kernels, to support all the hardware in my servers. I don’t do this anymore, and I haven’t done this since 2010 or so.

Work PC: 6.1.0-12-amd64 (LMDE 6)
Personal: 6.8.0-38-generic (Mint 22)

Both are laptops. Both kernels from mainline. Both work fine, so I don’t see any point in fudging around now that I found setup that work well for what I do.

I’ve never heard of “zen” or “cachyos” -seems to be some distro-specific optimization- and my computer doesn’t have a battery apart from the CR3232 for the RTC. I’m not quite sure what you mean with “battery life” - some policy for charging and discharging to enhance you battery’s overall durability or power saving and frequency throttling for longer time between recharges, but both are happening mostly in userspace.