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.