TortoiseHg developer here (i.e. I'm probably biased, take my comments with a grain of salt, yada, yada, yada...).
We discussed this a bit on the last mercurial sprint.
In jest, someone said that a lot of git users have what they'd call a "Helsinki syndrome". Probably that is not very far from the mark.
I think that what git brings in functionality is good enough (specially compared to non DVCSs) to make people want to use it and put the effort to understand it. On the other hand it is hard enough to use that when people finally manage to wrap their heads around it they are so proud that they must tell everybody about it.
It is actually quite brilliant if you think about it: Make a SW that does something really well, better than most other similar tools, but wrap it in a horrible UI to keep your users on their toes and make them proud that they are able to use it! This starts an incredible self-congratulatory feedback effect which gives notoriety to your tool.
If you add to that the fact that git was created by one of the most famous hackers of all time, plus the creation of GitHub, and then you get the perfect storm to make git the open-source tool of choice.
Mercurial on the other hand is just as useful (if not more) than git, but it is just not as hard to use. People use it, like it, but they do not need to feel proud about it. It is just easy. There is no need to talk about database details, reflogs, etc. There is no need to blog about it. It just works. This should be great and make mercurial the better tool but it has the perverse effect of not making it cool to talk about it. There is no challenge, there is no achievement in learning how to use mercurial. This makes it hard to get the same sort of buzz that you get from a tool such as git.
In my opinion it is a little surprising that such a knowledgeable bunch such as the Hacker News readers and the open source contributors in general are not able to evaluate both tools just in their technical merits and instead follow the buzz. Understandable, but surprising nonetheless.
We discussed this a bit on the last mercurial sprint.
In jest, someone said that a lot of git users have what they'd call a "Helsinki syndrome". Probably that is not very far from the mark.
I think that what git brings in functionality is good enough (specially compared to non DVCSs) to make people want to use it and put the effort to understand it. On the other hand it is hard enough to use that when people finally manage to wrap their heads around it they are so proud that they must tell everybody about it.
It is actually quite brilliant if you think about it: Make a SW that does something really well, better than most other similar tools, but wrap it in a horrible UI to keep your users on their toes and make them proud that they are able to use it! This starts an incredible self-congratulatory feedback effect which gives notoriety to your tool.
If you add to that the fact that git was created by one of the most famous hackers of all time, plus the creation of GitHub, and then you get the perfect storm to make git the open-source tool of choice.
Mercurial on the other hand is just as useful (if not more) than git, but it is just not as hard to use. People use it, like it, but they do not need to feel proud about it. It is just easy. There is no need to talk about database details, reflogs, etc. There is no need to blog about it. It just works. This should be great and make mercurial the better tool but it has the perverse effect of not making it cool to talk about it. There is no challenge, there is no achievement in learning how to use mercurial. This makes it hard to get the same sort of buzz that you get from a tool such as git.
In my opinion it is a little surprising that such a knowledgeable bunch such as the Hacker News readers and the open source contributors in general are not able to evaluate both tools just in their technical merits and instead follow the buzz. Understandable, but surprising nonetheless.