More (GUI) settings for Zorin Lite

General Help
1

Hi, I'm new here; thank you for the nice OS and support !
I just tried both Zorin Lite and Zorin Core.
While the former offers important settings for the touchpad of my laptop, lacking in Core, the latter seems to have more GUI settings for easier customizations.
Do you also find Core to have more GUI settings?

Do you know some application to install for Zorin Lite / Xfce for more GUI settings? GTK gui settings?

In particular, I wanted to disable overlay scrollbars; I browsed the forums and found that can achieve it by editing the /etc/environment file (adding GTK_OVERLAY_SCROLLING=0).
Did so, and works in Settings and other apps, but the change did not take effect in the Software app, for example.
I guess it's because it's a "gnome" app?
What would I need to install to affect scrollbars in the latter?
If I remember, in Core I could affect those scrollbars using either the preinstalled settings or by downloading "gnome-tweaks". I tried downloading this in Lite but could not find where it was installed.

2

You can toggle the scroll bars in Zorin Apperance → Interface; this is available in Zorin OS 17.2 onwards.

Once installed it should be available in the applications menu. Although it's possible that some settings won't work as well, since it's intended for the Gnome desktop environment.

The main difference between the Zorin OS Core & Lite versions is the underlying technology that powers the graphical interface which are, respectively, the Gnome and XFCE desktop environments. As you can infer from the name, Gnome Tweaks's is meant to work on Gnome and it might not work all that well on other desktop environments.

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3

For Z. Lite 17.3, Interface is not present in Zorin Appearance

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The installed "gnome-tweaks" - did not appear in the applications menu ; also tried to search it.
But thanks for the explanation that it may not work anyway.

4

For me, it is the opposite, actually... If you can specify settings, we can help you find them.

It is because the Gnome Software store included in Zorin OS 17.3 is the GTK 4 version, in which Gnome removed the option to disable overlay entirely.
As usual, Microsoft Gnome style of using force.
It is enabled by default and toggling it off is deprecated.

You can see this in terminal with

ldd $(which gnome-software) | grep gtk

I just tested a custom .css hack on my system to see if I could use that to force a larger scrollbar but no go there... I will need to look into this further. For now, it is past my bedtime, here.

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5

Only if you have fun with it; for myself, the Software app was just an example, to understand the limits of customizations and reasons for them.

6

In Endeavour Forum I found this post:

"So what I found as a solution for me was to disable the fading by adding an environment variable to the file:
/etc/environment

GTK_OVERLAY_SCROLLING=0

And then I set a fixed width to the scroll bars by creating the CSS file:
/home/username/.config/gtk3.0/gtk.css

Added this CSS code and set my preferred pixel width:

scrollbar slider {min-width: 15px;}"

When gnome-software uses gtk4, so you can look if there is a similar file for gtk4.0

Here is an interesting thread about this topic (how to adapt scrollbars):

https://askubuntu.com/questions/775201/how-do-i-get-a-bigger-static-scrollbar-aka-normal-scrollbar

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7

Perhaps a KDE distro is for you? you can tweak it like no other and there's a tons of add-ons.

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8

Did You checked ''Desktop''?

gnome-tweaks is for Gnome (Zorin Core), not for xfce (Zorin Lite).

10

@Forpli Lots of tricks at that link, thanks.

@Storm thanks for the pointer on KDE

Yes, nothing relevant there.

Okay, why then xfce/Z.Lite ' Software app allows to install it ? Also, Software app itself is a Gnome application (called "gnome-software") and yet it's pre-intalled in both z. Core and Lite .

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11

That looks oddly empty.... I'm not using Lite so I can't verify if that's how it's supposed to look like, but otherwise I would say it's possible some settings can't be applied to XFCE? Different technologies have different capabilities I guess.

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12

Because it is in the Repos.

That is the Software Store. That You can use commonly. But gnome-tweaks is made to set up the Gnome Desktop.

You could try it with a Reinstall of Zorin Appearance. To do that, type in the Terminal:

sudo apt reinstall zorin-appearance
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13

Different desktop environments can have different locations for different settings.

14

Reinstalling "zorin-appearance" doesn't change anything. I've also re-installed Z.Lite and still same (didn't reinstall for this reason, of course!).
No big deal, just stating the fact.

15

for the sake of curiosity and learning something: how come Zorin Core is then able to toggle that scrolling overlay for Gnome Software? With Zorin Appearance > Interface > Overlay Scrollbars, G.Software reacts even without restarting it.
I checked, with your indicated command, that in Z. Core, it's also a gtk4 app.
I also did a bit of research that one could see what keys might be exposed by an app's developers to users by checking, for ex:
gsettings list-keys org.gnome.desktop.interface
which shows one of the keys to be overlay-scrolling (under both Z.Core and Z.Lite, checked with my now "famous" triple boot :slight_smile: )
But such a key is not given for:
gsettings list-keys org.gnome.software
Maybe way to find out is to see what commands "Zorin Appearance " issues.

EDIT: the next were done in Z. Core:
Right-click on any app icon in Start/Menu doesn't show the binary/executable location.
Searched for "zorin-appearance" in Files manager, didn't find any relevant script.
Same for which zorin-appearance.

16

According to the official documentation:

GTK 4 will no longer support GTK_OVERLAY_SCROLLING. It has already been dropped from master. As of GTK 4, the overlay nature of the scrollbars is part of the toolkit. The blanket toggle has been removed to prevent developers from breaking applications that have not been tested with both combinations. To allow application developers to decide what their applications should look like, the toolkit instead provides a mechanism to opt-out or add a setting for users. The function gtk_scrolled_window_set_overlay_scrolling() can be used to enable/disable overlay scrolling on a per-application basis. Application developers can optionally use GSettings to have a user setting bound to the property.

So while GTK4 does not natively support it any longer, individual application developers can employ it directly within a widget.

Some applications may still respect disabling overlay, even as some don't, if those developers did not write it in after Gnome removed it.

Zorin OS Lite uses the XFCE desktop environment which uses xconf, not gsettings.
A backend for allowing gsettings to pass instructions to xconf exists, but I do not know much about it...

17

@Aravisian I had already understood from earlier your points about how gtk4 is different.
Could you read my previous reply again?
EDIT: you're using Z. Lite (only) thus I guess you could not investigate that question even if you wanted to.

18

I can, but I do not see how my reply does not address it...

EDIT (of my own):

I have an installed version of Core I can access, so I probably can investigate further. I would need to do so during a time when I can set other work aside - and load the machine - then take my time learning, as well as investigating.
GTK4 is not "new" but it is relatively new. I am reasonably well versed with GTK3, but GTK4 brought a lot of changes. A lot.

So even as this is a bit mysterious, I do not know with certainty why you can experience such different things and can only speculate that Core, loaded with Gnome by default, carries all of the dependent Gnome configurations, whereas Lite contains only the bare bones needed to operate the few Gnome Apps that Zorin includes as pre-installed.

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