I think there are tons of reasons to prefer Mercurial over git (ease of use on Windows in the early days being a big one). I also think there are a smaller numb

I think there are tons of reasons to prefer Mercurial over git (ease of use on Windows in the early days being a big one). I also think there are a smaller number of potentially more significant reasons to prefer git. But I think it's almost completely impossible to separate the success of Git from the tools ecosystem. I really think Mercurial would have been at least as popular as git in the long run if it had something as good as Github behind it from the beginning. The benefits of Github are truly astounding.