14 DAY TRIAL // The Debian distribution provides support for numerous processor architectures and it's one of the most prolific in this area. It looks like MIPS support will continue to be offered by the Debian maintainers after the developers get their hand on some new MIPS-powered hardware.
One of the problems for the maintainers in any serious distribution is the lack of access to specific hardware. For example, until the Ubuntu MATE developers got their hands on actual PowerPC hardware, it would have been impossible to provide support for that specific processor.
The same goes for other platforms, and the reason everyone makes distros for X86 processors that everyone has one. There is no fight over who is doing the port for MIPS processors because this hardware is not all that famous, and not many users have this at home, not to mention developers.
The MIPS architecture to be supported for several cycles
If you want Debian to provide support for a particular architecture, you need to offer them the hardware. The same happens with the Linux kernel, for example. Hardware makers send the hardware to kernel developers so they can test the drivers and make changes if necessary.
"In October of 2014, Imagination Technologies donated several MIPS-based machines for Debian development; these include substantially faster Loongson 3A (mipsel) and Cavium Octeon II (mips) servers. The brand new machines include three Loongson LS3A-RS780E development boards, one Lemote 3A ITX and three EdgeRouter Pro 8 port machines. Debian's distributed build cluster requires high performance and high reliability from the machines used, explains.We are confident that these devices will help us build and maintain Debian's MIPS ports over the next release cycles," said Aurelien Jarno, Debian MIPS port maintainer.
This means that we should continue to see work done for MIPS support, and this is actually great news because there are not too many distros out there that provide this kind of service.