PLEASE stop doing this thing where you hide the scroll bar when it's not being used, or make it invisible, or super thin and difficult to see. this post explains why. as an example of this...
to disable it on websites (firefox)
download custom scrollbars by wesley branton and adjust the settings to your liking.
to disable it in the operating system (on linux)
every gtk app does this stupid ableist nonsense. gtk refers to it as "overlay scrollbars", it's been the default ever since the "ruin every gui with 'minimalism' and 'flat design'" craze of the 2010's, and it's very difficult to turn it off.
if you are very lucky, your desktop environment might provide some kind of way to disable it, probably buried deep in some settings menu, but i was not so lucky and the way i made my computer usable was by
- editing
/etc/environmentas root - adding the following on its own line:
GTK_OVERLAY_SCROLLING=0
thank you to this linux mint forum thread for providing this solution
but in 2012 I was posting to the Gnome 3.12 Issue List that due to a firmware bug my laptop could not wake from sleep, and thus I needed Gnome to stop overwriting my suspend_on_lid_close=false setting, as I could not afford a new computer at the time.
I was then deluged by replies telling me "gnome 3 is about reasonable defaults" and "no one uses that setting so we removed it" which would be cool if it didn't overwrite everywhere else I set it in the OS.
it's my understanding that they fixed this eventually, but gnome/gtk has always had this particularly bad taste in my mouth that xfce and kde haven't yet, though I'm uninvolved in Linux these days partially because of that experience.
I'm unfortunately not surprised those same defaults are causing other problems when people are outside the narrow range of their vision
watching in real time in 2010 as gnome suddenly went from being a decent desktop environment with accessibility and customizability at the forefront, to being the one most actively hostile to those things (and toxic about imposing their ideas in general) in the unix gui ecosystem ever since, was certainly an experience
xfce currently wins the prestigious 'please just let me browse my files and manage my windows and display settings, i'll even accept some jank if it means not subscribing to some weird religious feud between factions of techbros most concerned with the details of how to shove their heads up their own asses' award, but pressure to move from X11 to Wayland may change this
xfce gets splash damage from gnome via mutual contact with gtk, but so far it's been the only acceptable one for me. i gave kde a try for a few years but it kept breaking things in updates and adding things that made me question whether anyone who works on it actually uses it
