Comparing Krita and Photoshop
One of the things people immediately notice when they see Krita for the first time is that we've got the same basic layout as Photoshop: toolbox on the left, palettes on the right and a single toolbar under the menubar. The second thing everyone notices is that Photoshop has nice, small widgets in their palettes, and we use ordinary Qt widgets. Qt doesn't provide any way to scale down widgets to, say, 80% (although we might use a QGraphicsView in the dockers with Widgets-on-Canvas...). KDE4.1 offers a "small" font setting that, when used, shrinks the dockers a little bit.
But... Do we actually grab more working space from the user than Adobe? The following image says not: it's a 1024x768 display screenshot of a maximized Photoshop 7 overlayed on a ditto Krita 2alpha8 screenshot, using the Oxygen style.
As you can see, our toolbox is a bit wider because of the Oxygen margins, but our dockers are a bit smaller. All-in-all, the working area is just as big as in Photoshop.