Yeah sorta. First you gotta know what the problem is, good luck getting the average user to figure out the UI looks off because of the padding. Then you gotta know where and how you need to change it to make it better.
Customizing is cool for power users that like to fiddle with their settings, however it can’t replace good defaults; not that I have anything against the defaults in this case…
Installing things on linux is generally the same as phones. There’s a shop-like GUI where you can look up your applications and get them, they’ll also update automatically.
If the software isn’t in your distribution repository, that’s when it starts to be like windows, you need to hunt it down and either get an appimage or something like that, or build and compile it yourself.