And now the near-future seems to be full of dongles, shame.
This isn't completely new, a lot of non-standard USB hardware needed a driver (possibly in userspace) to work. However it is going to be much wider.
I think we will need to find methods to advertising to consumers how to figure out if things work together. The single port solution is technically superior but there are definitely human disadvantages that I think we can overcome with a little work.
[UPDATE] Well, I stand corrected. It is actually possible to stuff a USB A connector into an ethernet socket. (You learn something new every day.) But come on, folks, telling the difference between a USB socket and an ethernet socket is really not that hard. You don't even have to look, you can do it by feel. But all these different USB-C/Thunderbolt ports are physically identical. They are literally and by design impossible to distinguish.
Not necessarily. Ethernet jacks are often wide enough that a USB-A plug can be partially inserted, and it's pretty common to stack the two types of ports. If one isn't looking directly at the connector (common when dealing with the back side of a tower or docking station), it's a surprisingly easy mistake to make.
Ah yes, the old proof that USB-A connectors exist in the 4th dimension. :)
No, it proves that USB-A connectors have half-integer spin:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spin-%C2%BD&oldid...
That's not necessarily a bad thing. With the right dongle you can now connect almost anything you want to a laptop. It was just a few years ago that it was simply impossible to connect some devices externally or at minimum there was a major performance penalty.
"logo up or to the left"
All these old adages will be lost in Internet Time, like tears in the rain...
And sometimes it takes a long time to look for the logo (both side has different logo etc.)