this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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Mercurial had a nice UI on messy internals. Git had an initially not quite that nice UI on solid internals. It is obvious why Git won in the end.
Gits UI is still terrible.
The reason it is popular is because it is the VCS of the Linux kernel and github became the defacto open source social media site.
You have got that backwards. Github became popular because git was popular. Nobody forced people to use it and which VCS the Linux kernel uses barely matters to anyone not working on it.
The truth is that a "nice" UI that doesn't allow you to know what actually happens because the internals are hard to understand is hard to trust with your code history that you still want to access 20 years later. Git is popular for the same reason Markdown, Textile,... are popular among programmers over WYSIWIG style rich text programs like Word.