Upstart was an event-based replacement for the traditional System V init (sysvinit) system on Ubuntu, introduced to bring a modern and more flexible way of handling system startup and service management. It emerged in the mid-2000s, during a period when sysvinit’s age and limitations were becoming more apparent, especially with regard to concurrency and dependency handling. Upstart was developed by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, with the aim of reducing boot times, improving reliability, and making the system initialization process more dynamic. Though at first it seemed likely to become a standard across many distributions, Upstart eventually lost mindshare to systemd and ceased to be Ubuntu’s default init system. ↫ André Machado I think it’s safe to say systemd won the competition to become the definitive successor so sysvinit on Linux, but Canonical’s Upstart made a valiant effort, too. However, with a troublesome license, it was doomed from the start, and it didn’t help that virtually every other major distribution eventually adopted systemd. These days, systemd is the Linux init system, and I personally quite like it (and the crowd turns violent). I find it easy to use and it’s never given me any issues, but I’m not a system administrator dealing with complex setups, so my experience with systemd is probably rather limited. It just does its thing in the background on my machines. None of this means there aren’t any other init systems still being actively developed. There’s GNU Shepard we talked about recently, runit, OpenRC, and many more. If you don’t like systemd, there’s enough alternatives out there.
