I was there when the winner was still unclear and this is complete nonsense. Very few people even knew git was from Torvalds.
Git started winning people over because mercurial was atrociously slow. The real nail in the coffin was GitHub which truly was revolutionary. Nothing else really played a part.
I don't remember it this way at all. Git always had the halo of the tool kernel devs use, written by Linus himself. There was no escaping this.
Mercurial slowness was never a problem for me, and these were the times before SSD! It probably was slower but I used it on some pretty large codebases (NetBeans) and it was fine.
BitBucket was much better for me than GitHub because it offered free private repositories with 5 users, which just happens to be enough for a small team/company/startup.
Sun Microsystems picked Mercurial for OpenJDK/NetBeans/etc, Mozilla was on Mercurial.
I'm still puzzled how Git won because in my bubble it was a tool with much worse commands and 'metaphors' compared to Mercurial.
I think it's a big loss for the industry that we are all (me included) on git.
Thanks for the insight. I never found Mercurial slow for anything I needed to do. So honestly I didn't recall. (update: I had an impression it was, since I remember reading the kernel team needed something fast, but I never 'felt' the slowness)
What do you mean by "there"?
If you mean you've been working that long my first VCS experience was with MS SourceSafe and quickly moving to CVS. So...
The first I heard of Git (as best I recall) I definitely knew it was from Linus.
Git started winning people over because mercurial was atrociously slow. The real nail in the coffin was GitHub which truly was revolutionary. Nothing else really played a part.