Interesting. The Zero W is still in active production, with production promises all the way to 2030. I would not want to be in the Raspberry Pi Foundation's shoes right now.
this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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MIPS I get, but armel feels a little weird; I’d wager there’s more production users of Debian on armel than RV64 - not a huge use case, but one that merits a bit more consideration.
I think ~2030 would have been a more realistic date, since most of the last devices with ARMv6 would be about 20 years old by then.
But riscv is growing and armel is shrinking so presumably there's not enough interest from contributors to sustain support.
True. I just think it's a few years too early; armel is dying, but I don't think it's 32-bit x86 level dead. I feel like 2030 would have been a better year. If they really found the user base was that small, though, then I guess that's less for Debian to maintain.