Created attachment 130434 [details]
adaptative mode

What height is your panel? Are you on Wayland?

Panel height is 36px. My screenshots were taken on Wayland, but the system tray looks the same on X11.

Thanks for using Wayland. :)

I can reproduce. The issue is not new and is actually caused by the icons themselves having inconsistent side margins. It may be exacerbated by the "One row of small icons" setting because that setting has very small spacing (by design for people who like super compact system trays because they have tons and tons of icons in it) because now with smaller extra margins, the icons' own margins become more visible.

The WiFi icons seem to be particularly bad offenders.

Created attachment 130495 [details]
gnome | macOS | elementary

IMHO the margins should be increased overall. Currently, it is waaay too small, depending largely on the margins of the own icon. This should be avoided because we cannot always expect the icon to have margins, especially the third party ones, and because even if the icon has a margin, the icon itself may vary in width, leading again to the feeling of inconsistent spacing in the tray. The way other systems deal with this is increasing the margins. See elementary is the screenshot for an example, the sound/volume icon is almost 3 times the width of the Bluetooth, however, since the spacing between the items is more prominent, the extra pixels taken up by the volume icon is barely perceived,  and it does not interfere with the general feeling of organization in the tray. This doesn't mean the plasma systray should adopt the elementary spacing, I think that is a bit excessive, but a middle ground should be beneficial.

Yeah, if we used elementaryOS's margins I guarantee that we'd get tons of bug reports. However perhaps you're right that the margins need to be increased a bit, especially for the case of small icons where the margins (or lack thereof) is more prominent.

Git commit 6dfac6d9af4b9f85d70f5e9826b701fc196c5d65 by Nate Graham.
Committed on 29/07/2020 at 22:08.
Pushed by ngraham into branch 'master'.

[applets/systemtray] Very slightly increase margins for small icon size
FIXED-IN: 5.20

M  +1    -1    applets/systemtray/package/contents/ui/main.qml

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/commit/6dfac6d9af4b9f85d70f5e9826b701fc196c5d65

Created attachment 130849 [details]
new screenshot

This issue persists depending on panel height.
My screenshot shows panel with default height 46px 
and Weather Report applet enabled in system tray.

Operating System: KDE neon Unstable Edition
KDE Plasma Version: 5.19.80
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.74.0
Qt Version: 5.14.2

I'm not sure if it is exactly the same issue, but the same occurs when I use Weather Widget mentioned in comment 0 instead of Weather Report applet.

When there's greater spacing between items to mask the inconsistent icon margins, tons of people complain that everything is too far apart, so I don't think that's an option.

Again, the only real solution is to make the icons themselves more consistent with respect to margins... except for the weather icon, which is mis-positioned due to a bug. So we will need new bug reports:

- One in kdeplasma-addons | weather for the mis-positioned weather icon
- One in Plasmashell | theme - Breeze for the network icon being too wide and not looking good in a horizontal panel
- One in Breeze | Icons for the redshift-status-on and redshift-status-off icons being too narrow and not looking good in a horizontal panel
- Maybe more?

Closing again as there's nothing we can do to fix this in the system tray itself and all the issues are in the icons and applets themselves. We'll have to do the hard work there. :)

weather and network issues reported

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=425305
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=425306