There is a way to ensure that USB devices are enumerated consistently but it involves writing some udev rules. You can detect the device type and which USB port it is plugged into and map that out to a defined device name (or pattern, e.g. foot pedal in hub 1 port 1 might get a suffix 1-1). I am surprised this is not done more often as it is really neat but I guess the majority of users just want their mouse to work like a mouse every time they plug it in. I used the udev rules process to ensure each USB MIDI interface is correctly identified even though they all identify as the same (cheap Chinese devices). It seems a bit of a faff and it would be good to have a tool (web conf?) to allow such mapping to be done without delving deep into udev rules with vim. 