I love OpenBSD, but can't do it; there is too much in Linux that allows for better battery life, especially on more modern hardware.

There's a userspace frequency scaler (https://tildegit.org/solene/obsdfreqd) that increases my battery life to well beyond what I actually need. I easily get 6-8 hours on my Thinkpad X1 Nano (previous generation). This is not even close to the M series Macbook battery lifes, but works well enough for me.

I do not run heavyweight stuff though, but that's with WiFi, cwm/dwm, Emacs, compilers (go, cc) and Chrome. I've had a bit of trouble with Firefox performance, so having to use Chrome has been my biggest hurdle.

I´d assume you use chromium, then:

       git clone git://bitreich.org/privacy-haters
       doas cp privacy-haters/chromium/default /etc/profile.d/chromium.sh
       doas chmod +x /etc/profile.d/chromium.sh

Logout and login again. Of course, run UBlock Origin under Chromium. Go to the settings and enable most ad blocking subscriptions, but don´t use AdGuard and Easylist at the same time, they often use the same ban lists.

I made a deliberate effort to, and realized I was making an expensive mistake and cut my losses. The (user-interactive) performance difference between modern Linux and minimalist, "correct" OpenBSD, on normal x86 laptop hardware, is night and day. No reasonable of amount of system tuning could work-around that. It was the wrong tool for me, with the wrong tradeoffs.

My suggestion is don't—or at least think deliberately and dispassionately about tradeoffs. UX latency really sucks.

(The painful thing is that almost none of it seems to be OpenBSD's fault—it's all the desktop applications that demand 10x more hardware resources than they legitimately need, and then degrade unacceptably when layers that actually should be less optimized, like OS things that have a safety & correctness tradeoff, do make that valid tradeoff...)

yes. simplify your expectations. realize that not every piece of technology is worth using. biggest benefit is they say no.

OpenBSD doesn't have bluetooth support. I'm on linux as my daily driver, but have started playing around with OpenBSD and FreeBSD on my antique thinkpads.

This is less of a bother for me nowadays as I mostly use Bluetooth through my phone.