Canonical continues to reveal details about the next version of its operating system that will arrive in mid-October. Martin Pitt has announced Cupertino's plans to replace Upstart system startup with systemd to log into Ubuntu, a different and more modern start. Also, systemd can do much more than you initially expected, doing much of what other Ubuntu components did, which is why you will end up replacing these components entirely.
Upstart is a project by Canonical for Ubuntu which replaces the daemon traditional startup that the company has used in virtually every Ubuntu release. But, starting with Ubuntu 15.04, Canonical changed the Upstart boot system to systemd, something that, like every change, made many users angry. In any case, it appears that Upstart is still being used as a substitute for daemon / sbin / init to manage the start of various services and tasks during system startup and to stop them when shutting down the computer.
Ubuntu 16.10 will use systemd, not Upstart
As we discussed at UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit) we are discontinuing using upstart to start graphical desktop sessions to use systemd (and D-Bus activations in some cases where appropriate). Without this, half of your sessions would be run by systemd units.
Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak will arrive on October 20 and one of its main attractions will be that we will have the possibility of using Unity 8, the new graphical environment that many of us expected in Ubuntu 16.04. We can use it, but it will not be the default environment. If we want to use Unity 8 in Ubuntu 16.10, what we will have to do is select it from the login. Personally I am looking forward to seeing how it behaves when Canonical has it ready, especially to see if it opens the applications a little faster on my laptop. Let's hope so.
If for this version the convergence is not ready, I doubt very much in the future of Ubuntu. because there are already other alternatives that started last and already have a long way to go.