As I upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 to 11.04, I got a bit of a surprise... many system windows started using a new type of scrollbar that is pretty much unusable (at least it slows down my production time on my desktop.)

Yes, these invisible scrollbars (which they call Overlay Scrollbar) are... invisible. Now you have to hover the mouse at the right place to get arrows that you can grab and move up and down. Oh! Did I say that you have to however in one place and these arrows, on purpose, appear AWAY from your mouse? This means you need to then move the mouse over those arrows before you can start scrolling.

So, I looked for a way to get rid of the invisible new Ubuntu improved scrollbars. It's actually easy. You can set an environment variable that tells the system to not use the feature, or you can remove the module that generate these scrollbars instead of the normal default (luckily my browser and text editors were not affected!)

Solution source: How To Disable The Overlay Scrollbars In Ubuntu 11.04

In a console, type the following1:

sudo su
echo "export LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0" > /etc/X11/Xsession.d/80overlayscrollbars

Or to remove the new scrollbars libraries:

sudo apt-get remove overlay-scrollbar liboverlay-scrollbar-0.1-0

That's it.

• 1. For those wondering, the sudo su is used to become root before emitting the command because in this case the > operator does not work unless you have write permissions in the /etc/X11/Xsession.d folder which by default you do not.