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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Red Hat: Hires Alex to work on Flatpak. Loved by Community, almost a dozen distros supporting Flatpak as a next-gen package format by default.

Snap: Loved only by Canonical devotees. Zero distros supporting Snap exclusively by default.

Red Hat: SystemD

Canonical: Upstart, dead to SystemD.

Red Hat & Others: Wayland

Canonical: Mir. Dead to Wayland.

Red Hat & Others: GNOME 3

Canonical: Unity1-7. Dead to GNOME.

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Upstart existed before systemd. I used to think it was NIH syndrome, but its initial release was in 2006, whereas systemd's was in 2010.

It's not just a release date issue. It matters (to me, at least) that Canonical was doing it's thing, RH invents something shortly after that trounces Canonical, Canonical makes futile attempts to save the ship before finally dumping the project.

For example, Upstart. RH invents SystemD, Canonical stays with Upstart until, like, 2017 before giving up.

systemd's widespread adoption was somewhat controversial and took years. I realize Upstart didn't receive widespread adoption, and Canonical has historically liked to start its own products (Mir and Unity as you noted). But the discussion around systemd was not "everyone except Canonical thinks it's good", and Upstart had been in development for several years.

Wasn't it Canonical creates Upstart, switches Ubuntu to it, RH switches to it; a few years later, RH creates SystemD, RH switches to it, Ubuntu switches to it?

Ubuntu didn't switch to systemd. Debian switched to systemd, and Ubuntu had to follow or pretty much drop Debian as its upstream.

Do you want Canonical to just adopt whatever the new hot RH stuff as soon as it's stable?

You do want to know the alternative is stable and better for a few years before even thinking to make the change.

It's easy to laugh at the history after it took place.

Red Hat did use upstart before adopting systemd FWIW.

> Red Hat did use upstart before adopting systemd FWIW

RHEL added support for Upstart as a hybrid with SysV, however it was never heavily used and not by most of their own packaged RPMs. Spin up a CentOS 6 server, install a bunch of daemons then go compare /etc/init/ to /etc/rc.d/init.d/.

But the init system was Upstart. Upstart, like SystemD, can start daemons from SysV scripts. At the time, the majority of distros still used SysV or SysV-like init systems. As long as the newer systems had backwards compatibility with the SysV scripts and the newer functionality were not needed, why would upstream switch to the new format?

SystemD has managed to gain near-ubiquitous usage, to the point where plenty of upstreams now only ship systemd unit files, but I would argue that this change was first initiated by the introduction and adoption of Upstart in both Ubuntu and RH.

We tried to use Upstart properly in Fedora. We spent three Fedora releases trying to do that (Fedora 9, Fedora 10, Fedora 11, and Fedora 12). We gave up by Fedora 13.

ChromeOS still uses upstart.

There is work going on to port Chrome OS to systemd: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=583671

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