[mindajar]

bzr lost because it was poorly-architected, infuriatingly slow, and kept changing its repository storage format trying (and failing) to narrow the gap with Mercurial and Git performance. Or, at least that's why I gave up on it, well before GitHub really took off and crushed the remaining competition.

For my own sanity I began avoiding Canonical's software years ago, but to me they always built stuff with shiny UI that demoed well but with performance seemingly a distant afterthought. Their software aspirations always seemed much larger than the engineering resources/chops/time they were willing to invest.

[necovek]

Sure, that's a fair point as well (though bzr came out of GNU arch, which didn't originate at Canonical, and it was finally redesigned into something good at Canonical — not a knock on arch either, it was simply early).

The question then becomes: why not Mercurial which still had a better UX than git itself?

My point is that git won because of GitHub, despite lots of suckiness that remains to this day (it obviously has good things as well).