[globular-toast]

> patches and tarballs workflow is sort of the first distributed version control system - everyone has a local copy, the changes can be made locally, access to "merge" is whomever can push a new tarball to the server.

Nitpick, but that's not a distributed workflow. It's distributed because anyone can run patch locally and serve the results themselves. There were well known alternative git branches back then, like the "mm" tree run by Andrew Morton.

The distributed nature of git is one of the most confusing for people who have been raised on centralised systems. The fact that your "master" is different to my "master" is something people have difficulty with. I don't think it's a huge mental leap, but too many people just start using Gitlab etc. without anyone telling them.