I'm reminded of that article I read on HN a few months ago about how "you're not Google/Amazon/Facebook" and you probably shouldn't base your technical choices

I'm reminded of that article I read on HN a few months ago about how "you're not Google/Amazon/Facebook" and you probably shouldn't base your technical choices on what these companies are doing because chances are that you have a massively different usage profile and very different priorities. Still, everybody wants to be like the big guys (dress for the job you want, not the one you have) so you still often seen small-ish websites using a ridiculously overpowered and over-architectured backend. I think there's a bit of that in Git vs. Mercurial. Git was built specifically for the Linux kernel and it shows. Most of its quicks and features make sense in that context. But the thing is, the overwhelming majority of projects out there are not anywhere similar to the kernel. They have fewer contributors, there are generally much more centralized, they don't use 90's style mailing lists, they don't deal with dozens of millions of lines of code etc... I think for that "silent majority" of projects Mercurial was a much better choice indeed. It's simpler, for a long time it was much better documented, it was also easier to migrate from SVN and other centralized version control systems. But Git was cooler, it's what the kernel used, and if it's good enough for the kernel then it's good enough for me! That being said at this point it's clear that Git has won. I've been slowly migrating my (active) projects to Git over the past couple of years. I'll have to use Git one way or the other anyway, I might as well try to uniformize my workflow. RIP Mercurial, you deserved better.