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by talideon 1335 days ago
Upstart predates systemd by four years. It solved real problems at the time and they kept it going until Debian transitioned to systemd. Unlike systemd, upstart supported sysvinit scripts, so it made sense to transition when Debian did. Bringing that up is maybe not the best example you could choose to bash them with.
3 comments

I am not saying anything about decision to _start_ using upstart... All I am saying is that in the past, Ubuntu made the right decision multiple times and switched from Canonical-only software to a more common alternative once that alternative became widely used.

And I think that it's a grand time to slowly wind down snaps and switch to flatpak. Linux ecosystem does not need more fragmentation, and given proprietary nature of snap store, there is approximately 0% chance that anyone except Ubuntu derivatives would adopt it.

Maybe snap was better than Flatpak back in the beginning; I can easily believe that when the snaps were introduced, they were better than flatpaks. I am not going to judge. All I want to see a right decision made going forward.

If Ubuntu and it's derivatives go for Snaps then while that's a minority of distros it's probably a majority of the Linux user base.
Fwiw, systemd actually supports sysvinit scripts pretty well. You can mix and match, and write unit files that depend on init scripts or vice versa. And you can manage them all with systemctl.
Funny thing is that systemd just calls the scripts in /etc/init.d, but I'm told that it is an improvement.