Comment 8 for bug 908392

> but it shouldn't be too difficult to restore the old behavior

On Ubuntu, it should be possible to revert (globally) to the old-style scroll bars (that's not an Inkscape issue). I don't know whether the scroll bars can be reverted to the default gtk scroll bar style for individual apps only.

Otherwise - for Inkscape itself - patches are welcome (e.g. make the minimal size of certain (docked) dialogs and widgets not depend (among probably other things) on the minimal height of the scroll bar widgets (visibility of arrow buttons aka stepper, fixed or minimal slider length, etc.)). AFAIU Inkscape's dialogs and widgets intentionally do not have hard-coded initial or minimal dimensions in screen pixels, and this has not caused issues so far on other platforms and distributions which don't replace the default gtk scroll bars with a custom overlay.