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.

I never remember which one is natural and which one is reverse. When I use a mouse or a trackpad, I am moving the scroll bar. When I am using a touch screen, I am moving the content.

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".

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.

Natural is totally unnatural.

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.

Traditional for mouse, natural for touchpads.

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

I use traditional scrolling for everything except touch screens.

Traditional - unless it is fingers on the screen!

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

Down is down and up is up

You meant traditional or the wrong way. There's nothing natural about it.

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

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.

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 for scroll wheels, natural for track pads.

Traditional. I'm too old to learn new things

Traditional for everything, mouse or touchpad, natural scrolling fcks with my brain

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".

Natural on mice, traditional on trackpads.

Traditional on a mouse, natural on a touchpad. Any other way feels wrong to me.

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

Traditional. I imagine the mouse wheel on top of the screen, as if the wheel scrolls the screen content

Traditional all the way. "Natural" is not right.

Traditional for mouse (and trackpoint).

Natural for touchpad.

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.

Natural scrolling all the way; it just feels so much nicer on a big Trackpad.

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).