I briefly glossed over it, but Mercurial could have had the Linux contributors right off the back. It was built faster than git and was built with the kernel team in mind. I do think it is an interesting bit of group dynamics that the kernel team as a whole didn't adopt Mercurial (because there were kernel team members on both sides of the Mercurial/git divide), and some of that reason seemed to be, from what I read at the time, simply a dislike of Python by a surprising number of kernel team members.