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Tbh, I don't even know if it is true today. Circa 2008-2010, I think Mercurial was certainly better -- it was certainly better designed and easier for a newcomer to use. I'm probably going to be wrong/off on some stuff, but this is what I remember from the old days: * Mercurial had a better CLI by default -- it was closer to SVN, which made it easier to use, and it was designed so that you had one command that did one thing, whereas git was more flexible but you needed to remember a lot of option flags.
* Mercurial had better early GUI client support (this changed, but early on, I know this was a draw for me as a Mac user)
* I'm pretty sure Mercurial had better Windows support (I didn't use Windows so I can't speak to this, but I seem to remember this)
* Better documentation But git has evolved a lot over the last decade plus. Not only did GitHub really change the game by creating a more social layer on how to contribute/use git (and yes, I realize GitHub != git, but it definitely helped introduce a lot more people to git), it had features that really honed in on some of the pain points git had compared to Mercurial. Although BitBucket was sort of positioned as a GitHub for Mercurial solution, it never achieved the organic/viral adoption of GitHub. And when Atlassian dropped hg support last year, it was pretty much confirmation that git "won." Other than Facebook, I can't think of any major companies that use Mercurial or major projects that use hg. I used to be sad about this, because I felt hg was better designed, but I came to terms with the reality a long time ago. It is what it is, and version control is often something that network effects define. Use whatever you want for your projects, but git won. |