[pilif]

I guess the OP was referring to rebasing before merging into the target branch.

This makes the history look much nicer.

While it's rewriting history, the only part of the history you change is the parent of the first commit on your branch and you are doing it on your private branch before merging it into the public one.

This is a totally standard practice and used by many people. In fact, at my place we have the policy of generally not doing non-ff merges into the main integration branch, so the history on the integration branch is always linear.