Kinetic scrolling - why only for touchscreens?

[Roman Lehnert <roman lehnert givve com>]

Hi, 

when reading the dev documentation for GtkScrolledWindow, i stumbled upon the limitation of kinetic scrolling for touchscreen devices. However, i could not find the actual reason for the limitation. Can anyone help me out here?

The background of my question is that i wanted to get rid of synaptics touchpad driver, and move on towards libinput. I`m really missing the kinetic scrolling. Long documents and websites are a pain without it. I totally agreed with Peter Hutterer from libinput, when he says that this does not belong into the input driver, but more into the compositor / client. 

And with my XPS 13 (9370), kinetic scrolling works like a charm via the touchscreen, but not via the touchpad. And thus i tried to search for the reason and hope to get help here. 

Thanks

Roman