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When you click on the app loader button on the taskbar, instead of a Windows-esque start menu, there should be boxes (cant explain this well lol) like NextSTEP.

Not sure what's supposed to be in your 'boxes' but there's a few different application launcher widgets. I'm using one called Application Dashboard. It's a full screen app and recent document launcher. If you're talking about showing a screen full of your open windows/apps, then there's Present Windows https://store.kde.org/p/1181039/.

Providing a screenshot or a mock-up of what you are talking about is helpful to illustrate what you want to show up.

There are also a few different application menu/launcher widgets you can get from store.kde.org, including one called Tiled Menu which allows you to set up tiled widgets instead of or in addition to the usual menu.

this is capetown, i forgot my password

Ok, so it looks like what you want to show up is just a bar of (favorite) icons?
A couple of ideas:
You could try Popup Launcher which you can customize with whatever applications you want (not sure if it has an option to hide the names; though if you have the right know-how that shouldn't be too hard to change).
You could have a second panel with launchers which you can show/hide as you want.