I have experience with both, but don't have a clear preference... Hg, overall, seems a bit more user friendly for doing the run-of-the-mill things such as bran

I have experience with both, but don't have a clear preference... Hg, overall, seems a bit more user friendly for doing the run-of-the-mill things such as branching, merging, fetching code, delivering patches, etc. I find it more pleasant to use without knowing much about the internals. This makes it also easier to explain to people that used SVN etc. Git has a lot of 'magical command line switches', and (at least used to be) documented qutie sparsely. So you'll probably query google on how to get out of seemingly simple situations. On the other hand, Git allows a guru to do a lot of stuff such as re-ordering history to make nicer patches. Once you master how things work, these can be very useful. IMO, it doesn't really matter that much, you'll get used to both, and Hg and GIT are more or less equivalent feature-wise.