Version: (using Devel) Installed from: Compiled sources OS: Linux I can't really imagine why this is in this state and maybe I'm too nosy but the desktop icons within those grey rounded boxes are just unaesthetic and use a lot of my visual space of the desktop. An option to have a classic look would be something useful. As for the hovering thing that may be useful but still the default look is rather bad.
it has been discussed for a quite long time. the rounded grey boxed are here because if there is a wallpaper with the same color of icon text it wouldn't be possible to read the icon text. it is possible that in the future the text will have an halo around and the box appearing only on mouseover. it's not going away because it must connect the icons with action icons (a thing that is not used at the moment but will be used) and by the way, desktop icons as a filemanager view of the ~/Desktop folder are going to be completely removed
Have a look here: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157297
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 157297 ***