Comment 5 for bug 1006513

This is indeed very frustrating, and seems to counteract the enhanced usability that Ubuntu tries to stand for.

In my attempt to come up with a usable solution, I've disabled the overlay (which means the very scroll-handle itself) entirely. The orange indicator is still there, and I can still scroll with PgUp, PgDn, and alt+trackpoint (on Thinkpad; the standard scroll wheel most likely works too).

On Ubuntu 13.04, I did it like this: gsettings set com.canonical.desktop.interface scrollbar-mode 'overlay-touch'

You can revert it by doing: gsettings set com.canonical.desktop.interface scrollbar-mode 'overlay-auto'