> The Pi boards are terrible

Engineers and power users tend to forget that the Raspberry Pi wasn't designed for them.

The target market for the Raspberry Pi doesn't care about reading the SoC datasheet or connecting the latest NVMe drive that costs several times more than the SBC. They just want a cheap, simple board that lets them start learning and tinkering with ample resources available on the internet. The $35 Raspberry Pi excels in this regard.

> one which I won’t name, but the board vendor couldn’t even get a Linux kernel to boot reliably on it when it was shipping to customers

Please do! It would be very good to know that your vendor is doing that.

The only reason an engineer wouldn't want to tell us who the vendor is, is if the vendor is their employer. ;)

No not at all. NDA.

Whistle blowing anonymously for a technical person isn't complicated.

Lots of people would regard it as unethical however.

Whistle blowing? Isn't it ethical by definition? What could be an example of unethical whistle blowing?

Most instances of whistle blowing are situations where a person has promised not to reveal something and then decided to. Situations like that are necessarily an ethical trade off - the person doing the whistle blowing has decided that keeping their word is less important ethically than revealing the secret but this is a very subjective decision that different people (and ethical systems) can and do have different opinions on.

Or any other form of NDA, which are extremely common in this space.