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That's a pretty big claim. Git solved real problems at the time in a novel and extremely useful way. Coming from SVN (or god forbid VSS), the power and flexibility of git more than made up for its difficulty to grasp.

Why it "won" over alternatives with cleaner UX (eg Hg) is a different question, and I think has a lot to do with github.

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Mercurial came out essentially simultaneously, solved the same problems, with a much more coherent UX.

Early on, I was definitely a proponent for hg over git. I assumed it would at the very least remain a peer, given how much more sane the UX is. I was wrong though, and I don't think it's just because of github.

Named branches being baked in turned out to actually be a real pain in mercurial. Sure, you can use bookmarks (and we did) but starts to quickly feel like you're swimming against the current.

Git may solve real problems but honestly, it's a PITA to use. Just for basic tasks needs quite a lot time sink to understand what's going on and what do you need to do.

It gets in the way of the workflow IMO.

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