I had to work on a small project for someone, a couple of years ago. I did not have admin access (to install applications, libraries, etc.) on their 20-odd compute servers. They all ran Ubuntu that was about a year-old at that time. They all had the same software, but not the same versions; they were not all updated at the same time.

Long story, short: Git was a bitch to compile and run across all these machines. I gave up and installed Mercurial instead. I've stuck with Mercurial ever since. As far as I can see, the only thing Git has going for it now is the "social" nature of GitHub. Otherwise, when people ask, I recommend Mercurial over Git.

Once in a while, I come across issues such as this [1] with Git, and I wonder why such people insist on sticking with Git.

[1] http://dwm.suckless.org/customisation/patch_queue

There was a nice post about Atlassian's choice of Mercurial over Git on their blog: https://blogs.atlassian.com/2012/02/mercurial-vs-git-why-mer... Their argument about a windows version doesn't seem to hold today. There seems to be a first-class Windows version of git.

Since there exists HgGit (http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/HgGit) and git-remote-hg (https://github.com/rfk/git-remote-hg), the two are equivalent in the sense that you can use either to contribute to any hg/git repo. Which is your prefered flavour of interface?