There is an xfce4 setting, which does just that, right?

Well… yes… sort of…

You know – one of the important reasons, which I believe to be causing the fact that we keep hearing about “The Year of GNU/Linux On The Desktop” for some decades now already is the fact that no matter which distro you take, there is always “something” that does NOT behave. Not that in other operating systems everything always does behave. But at least fundamental elements mostly do. The same is still hardly true in the GNU world. And while it might be fine for geeks and nerds to spend their lifetimes digging obscure corners of /etc and co. , people who simply want to use their machines rarely find this kind of activity an appealing passtime.

Here we are with something that should be totally simple: set the scrolling direction to either moving the content or the scrollbar. And it seems to be simple. One finds the appropriate setting quickly in an intuitive place, clicks on the checkmark and goes happily after his business. That is until realising that the scrolling does not work again the way it is supposed to work. After checking and re-checking the settings it seems that everything is done “as expected” but it affects only some programs while having completely no effect on other. Yes, you may keep explaining to yourself and others that this is not because the OS is bad, and not because programs written for that OS are bad, and not because of this or that but because of, and so on. But a user, even a seasoned one doesn’t want to hear this. He wants to set the scrolling direction and BE DONE WITH IT.

After searching some threads and posts on the web I eventually seem to have compiled a /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf file, which in addition to the settings checkmark above, seems to make scrolling direction consistent in both “types” of programs:

$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf 
Section "InputClass"
	Identifier "ELAN2202:00 04F3:306D Touchpad"
	Driver "libinput"
	MatchIsTouchpad "on"
	Option "ClickMethod" "clickfinger"
	Option "NaturalScrolling" "true"
EndSection

I took whatever the settings showed me as the device (guessed which of all the available as – BTW – it also tells me that I have a mouse, which is a blatant lie and one more touchpad, both of which are probably just the same device – who knows?) for the identifier part

and added options I believe to be relevant. No idea if this is the “right” or the “best” way to achieve this very simple goal but seems to work for now. I can only hope that I won’t find a third type of programs, affected by neither of the two methods…

P. S. And I still have a very strong feeling that I shouldn’t be doing this at all in the first place.