Confused about Galculator's removal

[NM64]

DISCLAIMER: I am fully aware of the following thread that explained it was having build problems for over a month:

Why did the latest updates remove galculator?

During the latest update, either 20260418 or 20260419, galculator was removed from the system. Why did that happen? The system needs a calculator app. Do we have to reinstall it manually or is there a problem with it and we need to install another calculator app? And if this is the case, why didn’t the update itself replace galculator with another app? Thank you.

tl;dr I took the pre-installed copy of Galculator from a late 2025 live ISO of Tumbleweed Xfce and repackaged it into a .RPM file. This .RPM file installs and runs without issue (minus a signature mismatch) onto the 2026-10-20 live ISO of Tumbleweed Xfce.

So if it “just works”, then what’s the problem of including it? I’m no software dev, but does Galculator really need to be built from source for every single new ISO instead of just including Galculator as-is if Galculator itself hasn’t seen any updates in over a decade?

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Extra context

Xfce Tumbleweed is one of my favorite live ISOs due to its small file size yet basically fully-featured desktop, so that combined with its rather up-to-date nature makes it great for testing things.

For that reason I don’t often need a calculator, so I only just noticed within the last month or so that there is no calculator included!

Galculator is basically my favorite calculator as well as the slightly older versions of Kcalc (which looks darned near identical to Galculator), but the newer versions of Kcalc have a bit different interface which I still find better than gnome-calculator, but Kcalc is also a much larger download at over 200MB - not great for quick testing of stuff in live ISOs! (my internet is only 1.7MB/s aka 15mbps download)

It turns out I happen to have a 2025 copy of the Xfce Tumbleweed live ISO with Galculator pre-installed, and through a bunch of trial-and-error I actually managed to repackage the pre-installed Galculator into an installable .RPM file (albeit it fails the signature check so I don’t feel kosher sharing it). Normally the “proper” way would be to simply do a download-only via zypper, but the galculator package seems to have been completely removed from the repository…

And as mentioned in the above “tl;dr”, my repackaged .RPM of Galculator seems to “just work” on recent versions of Tumbleweed Xfce, so I’m very confused as to why it can’t still be included? I mean Tumbleweed Xfce even comes bundled with a video player, yet not a calculator?

[malcolmlewis]

xfce4-calculator-plugin, rofi-calc or just qalculate?

[hendersj]

@NM64

So if it “just works”, then what’s the problem of including it? I’m no software dev, but does Galculator really need to be built from source for every single new ISO instead of just including Galculator as-is if Galculator itself hasn’t seen any updates in over a decade?

As noted in the thread you referenced, the last update was 11 years ago, so it is effectively abandoned. While I cannot speak to the developers’ motivations for not building it, the lack of clear maintenance for over a decade points to a clear reason not to include it - if there’s a build problem, there’s nobody to fix it.

So it’s really a matter of “do we remove it now or do we remove it later when it won’t build” - and as there was a build problem that led to its removal and there’s no maintainer, it makes sense that it was removed.

A change in compilation tools triggers a rebuild - and maintaining code that requires an old compiler and related set of development tools requires special handling. Makes sense that the project wouldn’t want to do that for a single package that’s not used by many people.

[malcolmlewis]

@NM64 I see for Slowroll…

https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:bmwiedemannai:debiancontrib/galculator

So maybe this is a stage for coming back… Perhaps @bmwiedemann can confirm?