I use them both as well as Mercurial. My favorite is subversion, but that's only because I've been using it for years. The one thing I admire most about git is

I use them both as well as Mercurial. My favorite is subversion, but that's only because I've been using it for years. The one thing I admire most about git is its branching. You can experiment very easily with crazy ideas and just throw away the branch if it doesn't work out. Learn them both and pick the one that works best for you. But you should be able to use any of them. From old-fashioned CVS (which is still widely used in industry) to git because as a professional programmer, you never know what your next employer or start-up buddy will be using. And really, they all share many things in common once you get past the new-fangled distributed features. Edit: I should also mention that I prefer subversion's central repository approach and that I don't really need the distributed features of git but I can understand why Linus and kernel hackers do!