The Debian project has removed support for the MIPS architecture. This is the latest CPU architecture to be removed from Debian, betraying their tagline of being “The Universal Operating System”.

I take issue not only with their removal of the MIPS architecture, but of their reasoning for doing it.

The removal was […] because the architecture is one of the last big-endian architecture Debian supports

Paul Wise, Debian Announcement

For a project that claims to be a “Universal” operating system, this is a disgrace. As I’ve noted time and again, modern POWER systems support both endians. Since then, more and more 64-bit ARM chips are also gaining big endian support, such as the Banana Pi and PINE64. The Debian announcement even notes that modern MIPS chips can switch endianness at runtime.

It saddens me to see Debian falling behind the curve of technology, as we move towards computers which can use whatever endianness is appropriate for the situation. If you are personally affected by this removal, as I am, your only option right now is to use Gentoo or FreeBSD. Since Adélie and Void both support big-endian PowerPC, I am hopeful that both distros will work to support MIPS as well.