[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