[nyonyo]

https://i.imgur.com/jRiXEXE.png

Here's why no amount of mere customization can "fix it"

Last screenshot is from Gnome settings serving as a strong contrast to the rest (KDE screenshots taken from the OP article)

[sho_hn]

It looks like most of the margin differences you complain about are due to icons not filling out their square canvas/bounding box depending on the depicted object. This is generally how icons work, unless you go Android and slap a circle/squircle background on all of them.

Which isn't to say things shouldn't be better, of course.

There's currently a big multi-year community effort underway to overhaul how KDE's visuals are made, including adopting a modularized design system, Figma/PenPot and a new theming engine (Union) designed explicitly to serve the designer's needs. Along with the KDE Linux distro these are our two main next-gen efforts where we want a capability step change in our practice and product.

[ndriscoll]

The screenshot from the article is for a single application that doesn't really have settings. The system settings panel does have a sidebar with separators, including group labels and contrast/color to make it easier to find things instead of a big panel of gray on gray. So... better than GNOME. Here's a screenshot I found:

https://static1.ahelpme.com/public/media/tutorials/review-fe...

You can also see that the KDE settings screen can fit more than 3 options at a time without scrolling, which is appreciated.

That said like I said I do sometimes feel that their more modern themes have random extra spacing that would be nice to be able to remove. Better then all the other modern DEs though (except for power user window managers like i3), so in that way they've done a fantastic job. KDE is vastly more usable than the alternatives, including commercial.