Plasma 5 italicizes the titles of desktop icons that are symlinks, such as applications. I personally feel that this looks inconsistent and takes away from the clean, traditional appearance.
To disable this, you can run this shell command (may need to be run as root):
sed -i '/font.italic: model.isLink/d' /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.desktopcontainment/contents/ui/FolderItemDelegate.qml
If you’d like to return the italicized symlinks, use this:
sed -i '386ifont.italic: model.isLink' /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.desktopcontainment/contents/ui/FolderItemDelegate.qml
You will need to logout for these changes to take effect.
I’d love to see this as an option in settings and I might try to make my own KCM module with it included.
FWIW I don’t see this being accepted upstream. I already tried a few months ago and even submitted patches for the multiple components that would need to be patched, but the work was rejected. See 461450 – Get rid of italic text for links.
I don’t see the point of italicising it, it is obvious it is a symlink without the italics. It looks more like a solution in search of a problem, or, a “we can do this, so lets do it”
So this is still not considered to be an issue that needs to be changed, an option added? With all the customizability of Plasma this is one sticking point that is outright weird. It serves no purpose as links already have clearly visible icon badges and it only adds visual clutter to the UI. Italic font just doesn’t work and look well in a desktop UI.
For what it’s worth - just quickly scanning around, I don’t think I’ve seen any proposals that balance the overall design concerns raised in comment 8 here: 461450 – Get rid of italic text for links, while accounting for keeping the interface consistent and predictable (differences in behavior between desktop icons and Dolphin tend to produce lots of confusion and reports).