Someone should’ve thought about the UX of IPv6 before declaring it to be “the way”. It’s like having to learn Klingon just to setup your printer. IPvNext could sort that out… maybe it’s time to consider moving on.
People claim this all the time, but every time I push I discover they have no clue how networks work and just handwave away as "easy" or "details" the very reasons people who understand networks say it can't work.
> but every time I push I discover they have no clue how networks work
Obviously. Anyone who does understand how networks work aren't going to spend any time talking about it. People don't talk about things they are certain about. They talk about what they don't know much about to feel out what they're missing. You will never find a discussion where pushing back reveals that you found the world's utmost expert. The world's utmost expert is bored with the subject and has moved on to talking about the things he has gaps in.
I think you’re making my point - someone decided to surface a very low level concept “as is” (without a suitable abstraction) on a level where people also need it for use cases that don’t justify knowledge of the arcane. Or dealing with gatekeepers for that matter.
There are already abstractions that allows you to deal with IPv6 without actually typing in the addresses. It's the DNS, but every time this topic pops up, someone rejects DNS and proceeds to continue sprouting something about how IPv6 is unusable because you can't memorize the addresses.
For most people there is no UX. Most US houses are IPv6 and use it without knowing anything about networking at all (most cable internet is IPv6, as the big cell networks).
The people who have to make networks work need to know how IPv6 works - but there is no getting around that - they know how IPv4 works too.
>every time I push I discover they have no clue how networks work
Listen here, if there is a networking technology or feature that I wasn't forced learn when I half-assed a SOHO router config in 2005, then it shouldn't exist at all.
I learned the basics of IPv6 a few years ago, and forgot some of it... but NDP, the built in default addresses for router solicitation, address assignments and so on.
I'll tell you that if you just think of it on its own, it's really no harder than IPv4 + ARP + DHCP, just one or two extra things to remember.
The difficulty of adoption is the featureset and the UX of operating systems and home routers in particular. It is really difficult to find a consumer router, or even home networking OS, that exposes sensible working defaults for IPv6. The problem extends to the ISPs.
Like there was any chance to see UX of this to work or not in most of places. I've never had an ISP that even offered any IPv6 connectivity besides mobile internet.