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This is something I don't fully understand. How does it make merging more easy? I tried mercurial some time ago and it gave me conflicts for very easy merges. While I like it very much as a local version control for myself this merging was really bad. Now its not unlikely that I made a mistake somehow. But why should merging be more easy with git/Mercurial than with SVN?

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Before 1.5, svn had no real merge capability. In particular, it could not detect that you merged something already when merging a changeset. Also, the merge command effectively "squashed" everything - you could use svnmerge and co to get something a bit better, but the tools were very poor to say the least.

Technically speaking, svn merge is more akin to cherry-pick in git/hg/etc..., where the "merged" commits are not recorded as such, but as totally new commits.

Note also that bad svn merging capabilities are specific to svn, not to centralized VCS (perforce, etc...). It is not so much that DVCS are better than svn as much as svn worse than everything else.

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