I should not have been watching Netflix when the update manager asked me if I wanted to update, because I didn’t even look at the list of updates. In the middle of whatever it was doing, Netflix suddenly died, and I had to reboot because my screens were black. by “reboot”, I mean hold down the power button until the system shutdown. That is hardly the recommended method but nothing else would have worked because I couldn’t see anything! The next time I tried to boot back up, my graphics were funky; my screen was duplicated instead of being spanned across both monitors. This is not a good thing, but I’ve had to fix worse fuck ups. It might have been easier if I had been able to see my mouse pointer, but I couldn’t. Fortunately I was able to fix the interrupted update with good ol’ dpkg from a root session in recovery mode. I booted up again and managed to navigate well enough to open a terminal and type in a command that made the mouse pointer reappear. I still get an error about screens not being found, but I think I can fix that by switching the driver to…whatever it isn’t right now. Nvidia or Nouveau or whatever. Don’t know yet because I’m on a coffee break but I’ll try when I go back in the house. Anyway, whatever I did isn’t forcing me to switch to that stupid Unity desktop. That’s good enough for now, and henceforth I will pay attention before I click “update”!