It's important to note however that the main reason why Git became mainstream is because of GitHub.
And GitHub chose Git because of two reasons:
1. It was affiliated with Linus Torvalds.
2. It had a catchy name.
As far as I remember Mercurial had a much better UX.
Compared to Mercurial, Git is over-complicated and a lot of the commands don't make sense (e.g. 'git checkout -b mybranchname' to make a new branch WTF?). In a way, it shows how superficial we are as a society; even among software developers.
Git was already the scm of choice when Github selected it. It was faster than Mercurial (by far in some operations). At the time there was whygitisbetterthanx with benchmarks on various operations
I really don't buy this idea that features and quality of a project are what drives adoption. Hype, social connections and funding is what drives adoption, features is what follows (sometimes) once good engineers start to join the company (as a result of all the hype) but features and quality have very little to do with success.
And GitHub chose Git because of two reasons:
1. It was affiliated with Linus Torvalds.
2. It had a catchy name.
As far as I remember Mercurial had a much better UX.
Compared to Mercurial, Git is over-complicated and a lot of the commands don't make sense (e.g. 'git checkout -b mybranchname' to make a new branch WTF?). In a way, it shows how superficial we are as a society; even among software developers.