alt Hacker NewsReasonable-sounding arguments always come up in these debates, but in reality it all comes down to what you’re used to.
Disabling natural scrolling used to be the first thing I did on a new system. Until I once was too lazy to do it, got used to it, and now I can’t imagine ever going back.
So I was a Mac user for years and accepted and adapted to natural scrolling after it appeared as the default in 2011. When I switched back to a Windows laptop for work around 2018, I kept it on natural mode.
But then two years ago I got a desktop computer with an external mouse again and.... natural scrolling doesn't work for me on a physical wheel. With a trackpad, the metaphor is direct, that the page or document is being moved by the motion of your fingers; but with a wheel, I still want to pull it toward me to scroll down, because that feels like rolling the little wheel along the document, or turning it to advance the document beneath, like a printer finishing a page.
Maybe that's all silly, but for me it's natural scrolling on trackpads and conventional scrolling on mice with scrollwheels.