That happened shortly after the infamous Debian vote

Care to elaborate (on both, i.e., what's the upstart issue and how a Debian vote relates to it)? It seems I missed all of that, but would be grateful to learn more.

Ubuntu created upstart around the same time systemd was created, both meant to replace the classic init system. Debian voted to adopt systemd as their new init system instead of upstart, and so now ubuntu, because of it's debian dependencies, will be dropping upstart and moving to systemd as well.

> Ubuntu created upstart around the same time systemd was created, both meant to replace the classic init system.

Upstart predates systemd by over four years. I just checked the initial release dates on Wikipedia to confirm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstart [August 24, 2006]

vs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd [30 March 2010]

Ta!

Here is the relevant HN thread with some discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203364

I guess I always sort of hoped they'd hold out against the tide of mediocrity sweeping the init systems of seemingly every distro save Gentoo these days.