Plasma 6.5.2 was not just the 'Simple Update' I imagined.

 Plasma 6.5.2 was not just the 'Simple Update' I imagined.   It goes far beyond that. 
over the life of Plasma 6 so far, many of the incremental changes have simply slid into being and unless I actually read the release news regularly I often discovered them completely by accident.

One such change was something called AlphaBlack Control.
I didn't realise the importance of it until I did some reading about it.  Anyone who has read my posts knows that for years I have been playing around with Transparent and/or Translucent elements in my Desktop Environments, even in my GTK and Xfce based Desktops.   And the main reason I dropped Mint in favour of a return to KDE (apart from my Surface Pro experiments) was the ease of setting up translucency on my desktop.

So what 'is' AlphaBlack Control?

It is a handy tool that lets us change the Opacity and Colours of many aspects of life on our Plasma Desktop provide we have certain Theming Options set up.
To use it I had to go into the Colours and Themes Settings and install a Plasma Style called 'Breeze AlphaBlack'.

Once that is selected as my current Plasma Style,

quite a lot of the things that I often had to mess with in different places can be changed with a click or a mouse drag in one place.

Once again, I''l say there's a good reason that I seem to have repetitive panels all over my desktop.   I have been using Plasma (and KDE before it became Plasma) for well over 20 years.  One of the neat things I like is that I can have a heap of workspaces (Virtual Desktops) set up with different Apps or tasks set on each.
I do have a Desktop Pager near the middle of the Top panel, but I use that mostly as a visual reference to remind me where I am working.
Rather than using the Keyboard or moving the mouse up and clicking on a Desktop to move to, I 'prefer' to simply scroll the mouse on my current Desktop to move forwards or backwards to a different one.

So why all the Panels?  When I Maximize an App it covers the Desktop 'up to tyhe edges of the Panels.  So with Panels at either side that don;t go the full height of the screen, I still have a space at each side, between the App and the Screen Edge where I can easily scroll the mouse without having to move it all the way up to the Desktop Pager.

Something else I discovered I can do in Plasma 6.5.2
I can set a Border around my App windows that will be transparent when the window is inactive, 

And it will show with a hint of Red when I hover over that window.

So I can quickly untangle half a dozen Terminalk or File Mangler windows and not make mistakes with the wrong one.

Then if I move the mouse over a TitleBar button to select Close, Maximize/Restore or any of the other Titlebar Actions, not only does the Button change colour, but the whole Border shows what that button will do if I click it.

So I have no excuse for accidentally closing a window I planned to keep open.

And the colours are glaringly Obvious!

There are lots more goodies in the latest Plasma 6.5.2 but that touches on a couple of rather useful goodies that slipped past me - that I now use every day  :-)