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.
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.