Honest take — disabling IPv6 at home in 2026 is still a completely rational decision
The real problem is dual-stack hell When IPv6 is enabled, most OSes prefer it via the Happy Eyeballs algorithm, so you end up debugging a whole second network path for every failure
Double the attack surface, double the routing issues, double the DNS headaches, for zero tangible benefit on a home network.
The adoption story is grim too. We've been "5 years away from IPv6 everywhere" since roughly 2003. ISPs enabled it, CDNs support it, and yet the long tail of embedded devices
smart TVs, IoT garbage, older NAS boxes, printers still treat IPv6 like a surprise party they weren't invited to
The dirty secret is that NAT44 basically saved the internet from itself. IPv4 exhaustion was supposed to be the forcing function for IPv6 migration, but CGNAT and RFC1918 space just... kept working. So the urgency evaporated.l
Full adoption probably requires the last generation of IPv4-only embedded hardware to die in a landfill, which at current pace is sometime around 2045. By then we'll probably just be running everything over some cursed QUIC/HTTP3 mesh that abstracts the whole layer 3 problem away anyway
The juice isn't worth the squeeze until your ISP is IPv6-only and forces your hand
Today I disabled IPv6 on my home router entirely. There are (sadly) too many devices and services with obscure bugs when it's enabled, and I'm tired of playing whack-a-mole sysadmin just to keep a full IPv6 stack.
I'm not sure we'll ever see full IPv6 adoption.