I've recently updated to a git pull of KDE from a week ago, but never exited my plasma session and restarted. Upon restart, my nice looking task manager now has button shapes. This is supposed to be an 'icons only' task manager; and you've provided no option to 'remove button outline' so I believe this to be a categorical bug. I had previously used the regular task manager, which after a certain point of open windows, started to look like this. I dislike the button outline. In the history of making plasma5 youve removed a lot of the setting options of kde4's respective task managers. I am unhappy with this removal, because I cannot get my panel to look proper anymore, after quite a long time of using kde4 and being very happy with the "no button shape, no background color, with indicators" style. I would like it back. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Want icons Only Actual Results: Get Buttons Instead. Expected Results: Icons, no outline, no button shape, just icons that I can click on.
Outlines or not is a theme thing, not an applet thing.