Hardware? Software? Driver internal state? MacOSX gone berserk?

I have three computers on my desk. There is a PC (six-core AMD PhenomII 1090T) running Gentoo Linux, on which I am used to doing all of what I consider real work. There is another PC (eight-core Ryzen 7 3700X) running Windows 10, which is my gamebox and not trusted for anything more because ... well ... Windows. Fundamentally insecure by design. (This Register article includes a good high-level summary of why.) And there's a MacBook Pro which work mandates that I use. All three have Kinesis Vektor RGB mice, my current mouse standard since Razer discontinued the DeathAdder mice I previously liked in favor of bizarre extreme-gamer bullshit. (Also, it's half the price the Razer DeathAdder was.)

The last week or so I've been having increasingly maddening issues on the Mac, with it progressively becoming almost impossible to double-click anything. I assumed that it was some bug introduced in the last MacOS update, or possibly something to do with the way the Mac seems to think you really shouldn't have multiple virtual screens and really shouldn't ever use any CLI terminal-mode applications. For anything. Period. Ever. But yesterday I figured out that the real problem seemed to be a switch bounce issue that was causing the Mac to detect each time I clicked the mouse button as anywhere from one to five mouse-button events.

With a support query to Kinesis Ergonomics pending, as a desperation measure so that I could actually continue to get work done, I tried swapping the mice between the Mac and the Windows gamebox. The mouse from the Windows box is working fine on the Mac with no sign of switch bounce. More interestingly, the mouse from the Mac is also working fine on the Windows box, ALSO with no sign of switch bounce.

I'm now wondering whether the real problem was some kind of glitch in the Mac mouse driver, possibly triggered by the most recent updates, which was causing ... maybe multiple instances of the mouse driver to be running, causing the Mac to see random multiple instances of the same mouse and handle the same mouse event multiple times? Or perhaps some internal state bug in the mouse driver that had the same result of randomly sending mouse events multiple times. Either way, it seems that unplugging and reconnecting the mouse unloaded, then reloaded the driver and resolved the issue. It doesn't APPEAR there was anything actually wrong with the actual mouse.

The longer I have to use this Mac, the more I hate the cursed thing.

#computers #glitches