I think hg was&#x2F;is important, to provide competition to git.<p>But I don&#x27;t really understand all the people arguing that hg is so much easier to use, and so much cleaner. Sure, in the first few years that was true, and there&#x27;s architecturally better choices (not a mess of scripts, embeddable as library).  But from a day to day usage, hg seems worse to me. And that includes the documentation, something that really surprised me after I had to restart using hg a year or so back.<p>The whole thing how hard it is to actually get rid of branches (no, I do not want to merge that branch. Yes, I don&#x27;t want any central record anymore. No, I don&#x27;t want to ssh into the remote box. Uh....), really bugged me. So does the need, slowly abating, to activate a lot of random plugins to get functionality that git had for years (pagers, incremental add, staging area, ...).<p>But I very well, and I actually mean that, might just be mind warped by having used git so long and so continually that I just don&#x27;t see the problems anymore and it just seems easier. I do remember some initial difficulties understanding it, but that was in the quite early days...