Un-ubuntuing Ubuntu…

..post one of several million, no doubt. Ubuntu is pretty good, but persists in making what I’d regard as irritating desktop usability blunders. One of them is the use of “overlay scrollbars” which are scrollbars that are mostly hidden until you mouse over them. I found this annoying, but whatever, I can deal. It even more or less works, most of the time.

However, it breaks Inkscape. Inkscape’s color picker is a long strip of color patches, which you can click to select stroke and fill colors for drawings. The color picker has a scrollbar. If overlay scrollbars are on, then the entire area of the color picker ends up being the mouse-over area for the overlay scrollbar, so you can’t pick colors.

The fix is to issue the command “gsettings set com.canonical.desktop.interface scrollbar-mode normal” from the command line.