even thought the FAQ says i can disable plasma and have the old basic plain desktop metaphor, i can't for the life of me get rid of the button on the desktop. and the faq does not mention it again

i can make the taskbar corner buttons go away by locking the widgets, but the one in the desktop never goes away.

i now accepted it in the screen bottom corner, now i can at least make it a little bit smaller.

The only thing this button does for me is make me have to manually click the maximize button so a window can cover it. extremely unproductive.

There are third-party plasmoids such as IHateTheCashew on kde-apps.org which you can use to remove the desktop toolbox.