I think the unfriendliness is that features are hard to discover and the commands are at a lower level than beginners (and a fair few non-beginners) can tolerat

I think the unfriendliness is that features are hard to discover and the commands are at a lower level than beginners (and a fair few non-beginners) can tolerate. Additionally, almost everyone uses a pretty straightforward workflow with git, but if you look at the docs it looks very complicated. You aren't trying to git checkout -b you are trying to start a new feature. This is a weird layer to add for someone struggling to control a computer using the keyboard instead of the mouse. The other thing is that the dev community has settled on a small range of simple and effective git workflows, where you only ever need 6ish commands, but check this out from man giteveryday (which man git sends you to if you want a simple answer): satellite$ git clone mothership:frotz frotz (1) satellite$ cd frotz satellite$ git config --get-regexp '^(remote|branch)\.' (2) remote.origin.url mothership:frotz remote.origin.fetch refs/heads/:refs/remotes/origin/ branch.master.remote origin branch.master.merge refs/heads/master satellite$ git config remote.origin.push \ +refs/heads/:refs/remotes/satellite/ (3) satellite$ edit/compile/test/commit I mean it's cool for a power user but a little intimidating for someone who just learned about man pages. Of course if you copy and paste it those (numbers) are going to give some weird errors. Edit: I should mention that despite the critique I appreciate all the incredible work they did in exchange for absolutely nothing from me.