[imiric]

Git itself might not have been revolutionary, but the concept of distributed version control certainly was. Git wasn't the only tool from that era to adopt this model, but it's fair to say that it has won the popularity contest, and is the modern standard in most projects.

Mercurial, Darcs and Fossil are also interesting, and in some ways better than Git, but Git won because it had the persona of Linus behind it, one of the most popular and influential OSS projects using it as proving ground, and a successful and user friendly commercial service built directly around it, that included it even in its name. All of this was enough for Git to gain traction and pull ahead of other DVCSs, even though in the early days Mercurial and Bitbucket were also solid and popular choices.

I used and preferred Mercurial for a long time, but ultimately Git was more prevalent, and it felt like swimming against the current. I feel like that also happened with Docker (Swarm) and Kubernetes, where k8s is now the de facto container orchestration standard, much to my own chagrin.