The Debian project will no longer support the 32-bit version of mips, also known as mipsel, with the next release of its Debian operating system. Version 12, “Bookworm”, is the latest stable release with mipsel support.

Mipsel support has been discontinued due to several issues: The team writes Behind the operating system. It didn’t work out that way Problem with the program “Year 2038”. To solve it there was a memory limit of 2 GB in User space. Another reason cited is that the development team lacks the manpower to maintain the processor architecture.

Mipsel was actually removed from Debian’s unstable beta on Saturday. In the next stable release of the distro, called “Trixie,” the build will also no longer be supported. This version is not expected to be released for another two years. The 32-bit version of mips was one of the oldest architectures still supported by the operating system; Only the 38-year-old i386 has been around a little longer. The 64-bit version, mips64el, will get an official port with Debian version 13. Additionally, Trixie will likely include support for RISC-V hardware.

Debian has been around for almost 30 years. Ian Murdock announced on August 16, 1993 that his Debian Linux release was near, with Debian 0.01 released on September 15 of the same year. The first stable version was released in 1996. The Linux-based operating system has now become very popular. Debian is the basis for many other popular Linux distributions, including Ubuntu.