alt Hacker NewsWhatever your opinion on one tool or another might be - it does seem weird that the "market" has been captured by what you are saying is a lesser product.
IOW, what do you know that nobody else does?
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GitHub had a business model where public repos were free. BitBucket didn’t.
That’s it. That’s why git won, you could put up open source libs with one for free and not the other.
Which is extra funny as the centralized service was the most important part of decentralized version control.
Worse products win all the time. Inertia is almost impossible to overcome. VHS vs Betamax is a classic. iPod wasn’t the best mp3 player but being a better mp3 player wasn’t enough to claw market share.
Google and Meta don’t use Git and GitHub. Sapling and Phabricator much much better (when supported by a massive internal team)
JWZ is still blocking traffic from HN so you can't click to read this but you can copy/paste it into a new tab or open it in a incognito window:
Network effects and marketing can easily prevent better tools from winning.
That worse is better, and some people don't know better or care.
Welcome to VHS and Betamax. the superior product does not always win the market.
So far you've only gotten responses to "how can a worse product win?", and they are valid, but honestly the problem here is that Mercurial is not a better product in at least one very important way: branches.
You can visit any resource about git and branches will have a prominent role. Git is very good at branches. Mercurial fans will counter by explaining one of the several different branching options it has available and how it is better than the one git has. They may very well be right. It also doesn't matter, because the fact that there's a discussion about what branching method to use really just means Mercurial doesn't solve branches. For close to 20 years the Mercurial website contained a guide that explained only how to have "branches" by having multiple copies of the repository on your system. It looks like the website has now been updated: it doesn't have any explanation about branches at all that I can find. Instead it links to several different external resources that don't focus on branches either. One of them mentions "topic", introduced in 2015. Maybe that's the answer to Git's branching model. I don't care enough to look into it. By 2015 Git had long since won.
Mercurial is a cool toolbox of stuff. Some of them are almost certainly better than git. It's not a better product.