Linux

Trackpads and touchscreens get the phone way of scrolling.
These feel like you are interacting with a piece of paper, so you move the paper around.

Mousewheels get the traditional way of scrolling.
Mice are more like controlling something.
It just is. Like F1-F12 keys are always F1-F12 keys, not the alt-function (like media/brightness etc).

I hate that Apple has called it "natural" Vs "reverse" in some psychological reconfiguring that you are going against the grain if you don't agree with them (as opposed to them changing the established standard).

It's a good thing Apple doesn't make cars. They'd put the gas pedal on the left just to be different, and claim it's more "natural" that way.

The thing you're apparently calling "traditional" seems natural to me.

I've never really stopped and thought about it before, but as far as I can figure, my brain expects the part of the system that does or would actually touch the surface to drag the screen in a particular direction through the simple workings of physics.

On a touchscreen, it's simple - it's my finger actually touching the screen and it drags the screen around exactly as I'd expect.

With a mouse, my finger isn't the important part because it's not touching the surface (or more precisely, the mousepad that substitutes for the surface). Rather, my finger is contolling the mouse, and the underside of the mouse is touching the surface. And as far as that goes, the "traditional" way it works is correct - when I move my finger downward on the mouse wheel, the bottom side of the wheel - the part that would actually be touching the surface if it was a purely mechanical system - is moving upward, so would drag the screen upward.

So to me, that's what's natural.

"Natural" only seems natural if you were raised mostly on touchscreen devices, I've never seen a desktop have inverted scroll like that.

On a side note, Why do so many Linux programs not support auto scrolling by default if at all?

I didn't even know autoscroll was the name of middle clicking to scroll were your mouse went until I switched to Linux and noticed it missing in certain places.

There is nothing natural about "natural scrolling".

Natural is totally unnatural.

In the beginning, the mouse did not have a wheel. The only way to move the view was by dragging the scrollbar with the mouse pointer. So when we got mouse wheels, it was easy to just connect the wheel to the scrollbar. And thus the traditional direction makes sense since you are moving the scrollbar, not the view. With time, the scrollbars became more and more hidden, and we got a disconnect between what we were scrolling (the almost hidden scrollbar) and what we thought we were scrolling (the view). When you think of it as manipulating the view directly, the natural scroll makes sense. Because that is what we do in touch devices (manipulate the view directly).

That said, I use traditional scrolling because it's what I am used to.

Traditional with mice, natural with touchpads.

Interesting story, I used traditional scrolling with touchpads all my life until I spent three years exclusively using a desktop. Came out of it suddenly rewired to scroll like I do on my phone.

Real gangstas also switch their PGUP and PGDN keys to natural scrolling.

I use traditional scrolling for everything except touch screens.

Traditional for mouse, natural for touchpads.

Traditional - unless it is fingers on the screen!

I hate how natural is called natural cuz there's nothing natural about it, when using a touchpad or mouse you're controlling the viewport, mouse down should move the viewport down

Down is down and up is up

Traditional for both scroll wheels and trackpads (trackpads are emulating a mouse, you heathers!) And inverted Y for gaming.

Traditional for scroll wheels, natural for track pads.

Start realising that the way you're used to scrolling with your mouse wheel, is a cog between you and the service it's moving. Actually you were using natural all along. It was the early touch pads that were wrong and nonsense.

I hate "natural" scrolling but I understand that it's only because I've been conditioned for decades with the traditional desktop scrolling method. It's not "better", it's just not worth the effort to retrain myself for something that is merely equivalent.

UI design should not be dictated by what people learned on decades-old systems. It should be designed just as much for new users. So even though I personally hate it, I think it's a reasonable default.

I remember when I first started using GUIs, the scrolling direction seemed counterintuitive. As I introduced beginners to computing in the 90s, I saw many with the same confusion at first. "Why does it move up when I press down?" Everyone got used to it pretty quickly, but that doesn't make it "right".

If it's a touch screen then the "natural way" is more intuitive, as it feels like grabbing the actual subject matter and moving it in a direction while my view point stays the same. Once my hand is not touching the subject matter, the traditional way is the only one that makes sense to me. I also get annoyed when something has scroll wheel zoom and up is zooming out, I have to reverse that back or I just don't use it.

Traditional. I'm too old to learn new things

Traditional for mouse and natural in case of touchpads. That what I use with my Mac :)

Natural on mice, traditional on trackpads.

We still scroll "down" to the "bottom" of the page, so how is moving your finger up more natural? Maybe i'm just old now.

Traditional for everything. Scrolling down means the view goes down. The mouse controls the camera (the reason why I always invert Y axis on controllers).

Traditional with an actual mouse, natural on my track pad. On the track pad, traditional feels super weird.

It makes no sense to me. A lot of Windows drivers seem to default to it now, so scrolling down on the wheel scrolls up on the screen. I always change it back to the old method, as this way is backwards to be.

"Natural" is so ingrained in me by now that Samsung Dex' lack of the option is fucking with me.

Traditional for everything that isn't a touchscreen. Partly bc it's what I was raised with, partly practical. It's easier for me to two-finger scroll traditionally on a trackpad since it's less finger/wrist movement. If I use natural my fingernails hit the trackpad making the input unreliable, or I end up having to p much move my whole forearm to scroll. So traditional works better for me personally.

I get the idea behind natural scrolling, but there's that level of disconnect for me since I'm not interacting with screen directly, so my brain thinks of it like a mouse instead of like touchscreen. I'm guessing my brain might think of it differently had I been a little younger; I've used computers to some extent all my life, but didn't own a touchscreen device until college.

Idk, natural scrolling on any pointing device trips me up.