Emacs Scrollbar Artifact on Kubuntu

What's this then?

I switch back and forth between Kubuntu and Ubuntu (Ubuntu seems to work better, but I like the aesthetics of Kubuntu) and one of the problems I had was that when I launched emacs in Kubuntu it had a permanent scrollbar in the center of the window that blocked out whatever text was there.

nil

It's more of an annoyance than anything else but since it doesn't happen on Ubuntu I figured I'd try and fix it. It took me a couple of different searches to find the answer so I thought I'd document it in case I need to remember this later.

The Cause

This is the desktop that's causing the problem:

nil

It turns out that it's because my monitors are of different resolutions and in order to be able to read anything on the higher-resolution monitor I had to set the display scale to 200%, but this causes a problem with the scaling of the widgets (at least that's what it said on the reddit post where I found the solution).

The Fix

The fix for me was to edit the ~/.local/share/applications/emacs.desktop file so that the EXEC line read:

Exec= /usr/bin/env GDK_SCALE= emacs

Once this was in place the artifact went away.

nil

The Source

I linked to it above, but this is the reddit post where I found the fix: