Xunlong (Orange Pi) operates similarly to Pine64, throw hardware at the community and then let the community figure out the software part.

They provide official OS images at release but don't care much afterwards.

Pine64's claim to fame is that they have really good documentation, surpassing even the Raspberry Pi. That's what creates a good community around their products.

Most customers couldn't port software to an SBC, but for the ones who can, having all of the documentation makes it trivially easy, and having any that share their work makes it available to the whole community.

Check out the Oz64 documentation, (https://pine64.org/documentation/Oz64/_full/) which includes schematics and links to the datasheets for all of the major components. Raspberry Pi products, on the other hand, need some pretty intense reverse engineering to develop on: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/reverse-engineering-a....

For my use case, and most Pine64 customers, I'd rather have the hardware documentation than off-the-shelf official support for a software stack. Raspberry Pi has an entirely different user base.

Orange Pi fills a similar niche, and really anyone releasing RISC-V SBCs at this point does too, as it's too early into the development of the architecture for microprocessor-level products.

There's a RV64 port of Debian and the RV2 and R2S are on the list of compatible hardware. No guarantee it'll be easy getting it loaded, it was like pulling teeth to get it on the SiFive U74 board, but that was 7 years ago, so it's GOT to be better by now.

There are plenty of Orange Pi boards with Armbian or unofficial Ubuntu support, but they’re ARM based.