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”