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Worth adding a distinction people conflate: the translation layer for applications is not the same as virtualisation.

macOS on Apple Silicon includes a translation layer that runs x86 macOS applications transparently and remarkably well. That leads people to assume an x86 virtual machine should work equally well, and it does not — the translation layer operates on application binaries at the operating system level, not on a guest kernel booting its own operating system.

So "my old x86 apps run fine, why not a virtual machine" has a real answer: those are different mechanisms operating at different layers, and only one of them is available.

One thing that confuses people about why the keys vanished: the function row on these machines is shared between system functions and application functions, and which one you get depends on a setting.

So on some machines the keys are not missing so much as assigned to something else, and the behaviour of the modifier key is inverted from what you expect. Checking the keyboard settings for how the function row behaves is worth doing before installing anything, because occasionally the keys work and are simply behind the modifier.

The daemon restart is the one that has worked consistently for me when nothing else did. Everything else in that list is a nudge; that one is a reset.

Worth knowing the general shape rather than a specific command, since process names do change between releases: you are looking for the background process that handles cloud document sync, and killing it causes the system to relaunch it, which starts a fresh sync cycle.

One caution: do not do this while a large upload is in progress. It will resume, and interrupting a big transfer repeatedly is how people end up with sync that never completes.

One practical tip that costs nothing: applications with wide menus make it worse, and you may not have noticed which.

Status items are hidden when the application menus on the left extend far enough to meet them. So the number you can display varies by which application is in front — a program with many long menu titles pushes the boundary right and hides more of your icons.

If items appear and disappear as you switch applications, that is the mechanism, and it is not a bug. Switching to a program with short menus temporarily reveals icons you thought were gone, which is a useful emergency way to reach one.

Once you have confirmed that from the log, the fix depends on one question: do you care about the data?

If yes, there is a supported upgrade path. The database ships a tool for upgrading a data directory from one major version to the next, and the package manager usually provides a wrapper for it. This is the correct route and it preserves everything. Take a copy of the data directory first.

If no — and for a development machine this is often the honest answer — remove the old data directory and initialise a fresh one. Your databases are gone, which is fine if they were scratch, and the service starts immediately.

One thing worth checking before either: when the package manager upgrades a package like this, it often prints a message telling you exactly what to run. That message scrolls past and nobody reads it. It can usually be shown again with the package information command, and it frequently contains the whole answer.

The bootstrap error is the service manager reporting that the process it launched exited immediately. It is not the real error — it is the wrapper telling you something failed underneath, which is why it is useless on its own.

Read the database's own log. The package manager writes logs to a known location, and the log will contain the actual reason. That single step turns this from guesswork into a specific fix, and it is the step people skip.

In the overwhelming majority of these cases the reason is a data directory left over from an older major version. Database servers of this kind store data in a version-specific on-disk format. Reinstalling gives you a newer major version, which starts, looks at the existing directory, finds a format it does not understand, and exits.

So the sequence is: install newer major version, old data directory present, immediate exit, unhelpful wrapper message.