My copy arrived today too. I don't think the time it took to get here was all that bad: approx 10 days including two weekends.
I had a chance to play around with it a bit and I have to say first impressions are quite disappointing, particularly when you consider the advertising hype.
The worst culprit is KX-Lite. Quite awful. It failed to display at all on my new laptop (which incidentally cost less than an AmigaOne board would), even though Knoppix and every other "live" Linux CD I've tried works fine. On the desktop system it did boot, but failed to recognise my cordless optical USB mouse. Again, Knoppix and all the other "live" distros work fine. When I stuck a PS/2 mouse on that worked, but when I tried changing screen resolution to 1280x1024 it changed the WB screen size without changing the actual resolution, so I was left staring at an area somewhere in the middle of WB and no way to redress the situation. All this inside the first 5 minutes of trying it on both systems. Bad first impressions tend to last!
More minor, but still significant is the lack of work on the aspect of the WB you are booting into, be it through KX-lite or a standard install of AF6. A horrible gray background (familiar to AF users), standard system topaz font unsuitable for such resolutions and the horrid distorted standard AmigaOS gadgets. Not to mention the default 8-bit colour resolution. Why? If you "forget" your CD in your friend's machine, most likely that friend will be looking at a horrid gray display and be unable to do anything because their mouse won't work. They'll be really impressed. Not.
Did I mention that starting DOpus Magellan replaces the newly introduced Glow-icons on the Workbench with some truly apalling 4-colour monstosities?
What am I saying? I'm saying it's a missed opportunity. It could, and should, have been so much better with more time spent on taking care of the details. Where are the PowerIcons? Where's VisualPrefs? Why aren't the fonts configured to match the resolution? Where's the nice clean stylish background and colour scheme? Where's the developer configuration to allow people to boot into a pre-configured developer environment? Why is KX-Lite crippled? Why does it still look awful compared to the Amiga-In-A-Box setup of years ago?
I said two weeks ago that I felt the upgrade price was steep. One of the reasons I was given was that "it represents two years of hard work". If so, it's a shame those two years didn't include two weeks spent paying attention to detail. I'd rather have had that than the audio and video filler material that's supposed to be so exciting.
I like Michael personally and respect the way he has stayed clear of the muck that's been flying around the Amiga scene for the past few years, but I think AF6 is a big let-down, and it need not have been.
