I recently upgraded to Kubuntu 24 and I’m unable to get my task manager icons as large as they used to be. They used to be almost twice the height of the text.
This is a usability issue for me since I find this display too compact for quick visual recognition. It also leaves most of the space unused in my typical setup.
welcome.
do you normally need the text at all in your use case?
you could switch to the icons only task manager and there the icons should scale with the width of your panel.
also are you using wayland or did you switch back to X11 at the login screen?
Where do I switch to icons only, so I can try that – I wouldn’t want them to fully grow with the widht either though.
I’m using Wayland I believe, as I did not switch anything.
right click on the task manger and you should see “show alternatives” in the context menu.
icons only task manager should be at the top of the list… just switch to that
the behavior should be the same under wayland as X11, but you never know
Thank you. The reuslting icons are however quite large with even more wasted space. It seems to consuem too much vertical height for the icons. I switched to column mode and it then seems to waste even more height.
Is there no way to just adjust the icon size like in previous KDE versions? This feels like a usability regression.
BTW, how do I get back to the text based manager, the “Show Alternatives” doesn’t appear with the icon-only task manager.
Related, but is there a way to change how long it takes for the preview to appear? It’s too much of a delay by default. I feel this would make the icons only task manager easier to use if I could get the previews to be immediate.
There’s also a defect here. It appears that once a preview is shown, it is meant that other icons immediately show the preview, but sometimes it has the delay again.
There isn’t a plan to reintroduce independently-set, custom icon sizes on the Task Manager, as it was basically too fragile in practice: 466863 – Feature Request: Bring back adjustable icons sizes on Icons Only Task Manager
There’s usually at least some spot you can right-click on from a regular usage mode and still get Show Alternatives, but if that’s being tricky, you can always right-click and choose Show Panel Configuration - once you’re in Edit Mode, you can just hover over the whole Task Manager widget and get that option 
(For what it’s worth, some menu items might have different terminology depending on which version of Plasma you’re using - you mentioned Kubuntu 24, but Kubuntu 24.04 uses the much older Plasma 5.27, while Kubuntu 24.10 uses the relatively more recent Plasma 6.1 - and a lot of Edit Mode tweaks and improvements have happened over the past year!)
there is a setting under configure > appearance where you can control the icon spacing that may help shrink the vertical space.
regardless, if you right click on the empty space of the task manager below the icons, you should see the same show alternative menu option
have you tried
settings > genera behavior > animation speed
