Personally I haven’t. While Linux is imperfect, choosing the right distro makes the rest of the experience straightforward. And with it’s whole complexity, I find Linux more user friendly than Windows. Even driver issues, broken shadow file ownership and KDE specifics only made me more confident about my choice to use Linux after I solved everything.
It’s because X-Window, the original Unix (and thus Linux) desktop system, supported 3 button mice WAY before Windoze did. It used it for the clipboard paste operation; you highlight some text in one window, and it’s immediately put on the clipboard; then when you middle-click, it’s pasted into whichever window is under the mouse pointer. Most old hand Linux and Unix users like this behaviour.
It’s been optional, and configurable for a long time. It’s mainly controlled by the receiving window’s configuration, but you can set it globally to do just about anything supported by your version of X-Window, including to scrolling. It’s been like this since about the late 1990’s, but it’s just not the default behaviour, probably because for much of that time, most Linux users preferred the X-Window behaviour.
‘Kernel’ is probably the wrong term to use. ‘Not easily user accessible setting’ might be more accurate.
I’m not aware of any way to get Windows-style autoscroll on any distro without a lot of hacking. That was my takeaway from when I spent several hours researching this a year ago.
TBH the only time I’ve ever got involved with autoscroll was when a user accidentally clicked the wheel, and got “stuck in a funny mode” and the mouse was no longer working. I’m not sure how many regular users know it even exists - there are a lot who still don’t even use the scroll-wheel at all.
In Linux, the scroll-wheel works as I expect it to anyway, so I’ve never wanted to change it.