Comment by ryandrake

Here's a perfect example of this: Using a Mac trackpad on macOS, you can two-finger scroll as fast or slow as you want. If you go slow enough (you might have to "roll" your fingers instead of moving them down), you can scroll your browser pixel-by-pixel. This behavior carries through every app on the system. Scrolling basically does exactly what your fingers do.

Now, run Linux (say, Ubuntu) on that exact same hardware and try scrolling in Firefox or something. Instead of the content moving exactly as your fingers are moving, it does this weird jumpy "page up / page down" like thing as your fingers move. Even moving your fingers as slowly as you can will make the content jump to the next "page" 20 pixels down. This is not just Firefox's behavior: it carries through to every application.

Yes, there's probably some obscure GNOME configuration I need to add to fix this behavior, and if you search online you'll find forum after forum of people asking for logs and responding with "I dunno, try this." For something that should work out of the box.