The popular but at times controversial init/system management daemon known as systemd looks to be becoming the de facto init standard in the Linux world as Ubuntu decides to switch to systemd in place of Upstart. Mark Shuttleworth revealed the upcoming changes in a blog post titled 'Losing Graciously'.

In what must have come as a shock to many, the Valentine's Day blog post by Shuttleworth revealed to the Linux community that in light of the recent intense and much publicised debating and voting by the Debian Technical Committee for the next default init system for Debian Jessie, it would only make sense to migrate to what turned out to be the winner of the Debian init debate, systemd, being that Ubuntu is based on Debian.

Mark Shuttleworth wrote:

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While the complete migration won't happen for some time yet, the decision by Canonical to move from Upstart to systemd is a fairly significant one and most likely also has ended any of the internet "wars" of Upstart vs. systemd that can be found in various forums and mailing lists and marks the increasingly adopted systemd as fast becoming the standard in Linux init systems.

Creator of systemd, Lennart Poettering, wrote in a Google+ post that "this was a tough decision to make for Ubuntu! I am pretty sure it wasn't easy for them. I certainly believe it is the right decision, of course" and that he and the systemd community looked forward to working with Ubuntu in the future.