[jschwartzi]

I'm only a Bitbucket user because it's the only way I can get hosted Mercurial repositories. The Mercurial workflow is a lot simpler than Git and was much easier to learn. Git expects you to want to mess with history and accumulate changes into a special "staging" changeset before committing which just felt odd compared to Mercurial where I can commit and then keep amending the same commit.

[black-tea]

You can amend commits in git. But it sounds like you're doing it wrong anyway. If anything you want to make more numerous, smaller commits, and that's what staging is good for.

[hvidgaard]

I've had far better success introducing Mercurial to developers new to DVCS - anecdotal only.

Mercurials phase system is really nice, but with git you can selectively push branches. However simple this might seem, it's the cause of quite a bit of friction.

TortoiseHg makes visualizing the tool and repository quite simple, and it covers most of the day-to-day work.

I now have multiple developers able to manage advanced workflows, and unfuck a repository if someone did something braindead. After 1 year with git I was still the only person able to unfuck repositories, and it happend a lot more frequently than with hg.

[black-tea]

True. I've never tried hg or tried teaching it to developers but I am still the only one able to unfuck a repository after trying to teach people git (the DAG) many times. I think it's probably because of my background in C programming and having the idea of pointers/references so deeply embedded. Programmers who don't know this already can't seem to get it.

[hvidgaard]

To be fair, hg and git are so similar that you can convert between them almost 1:1. But something about hg just makes it work better for devs new to version control in my experience