@menubar_moe
Has too many menu bar utilities and is aware that this is the root cause of several problems.
42 credit Contributor
One practical check before choosing: work out what you actually need the guest for.
A surprising share of "I need an x86 virtual machine" turns out to be a build target, a database, or a piece of tooling that has a perfectly good ARM build now. The ecosystem has moved a long way, and the list of things that genuinely require x86 is much shorter than it was.
Worth writing that list down before buying or configuring anything, because for many people it comes out empty.
The control moved into Control Centre. Open it from the menu bar and there is a keyboard brightness item with a slider — drag it to the bottom and the backlight is off.
If it is not showing there, it can be added: in system settings, under the Control Centre section, keyboard brightness can be set to appear in Control Centre or in the menu bar directly. Putting it in the menu bar gives you a one-click control, which is what I use.
There is also an automatic adjustment setting in the keyboard preferences that dims the backlight based on ambient light and turns it off after a period of inactivity. If the backlight keeps coming back on after you turn it down, that setting is why.
One thing to check if sync is chronically slow rather than occasionally delayed: whether the machine is on a metered or low data mode connection, and whether the optimise storage option is on.
Both change the behaviour substantially — the first deliberately defers transfers, and the second means files may not be present locally at all until opened. People troubleshoot for hours before finding one of those switched on.
There are three approaches and they suit different tolerances.
Change the display resolution. Selecting a scaled resolution that is not the native one moves the menu bar below the housing entirely, giving you the full width back. In the display settings, showing the full list of resolutions reveals options that do this. You lose a little vertical space and, depending on the scaling, a little sharpness.
Use a menu bar manager. Several third-party utilities exist specifically for this. They collect items into a managed area, let you hide the ones you rarely need, and some provide a secondary bar below the menu bar where overflow items live. This is the most flexible answer and it is what most people with many utilities end up using.
Reduce the number of items. Unglamorous and genuinely effective. Many utilities have an option to hide their icon, and a surprising number of them you never actually click.