Both things are true at the same time. Git is wildly popular, and a large part of that is its solid and fast technical underpinnings. Unlike its open source pr

Both things are true at the same time. Git is wildly popular, and a large part of that is its solid and fast technical underpinnings. Unlike its open source predecessors (svn/cvs), it excelled at distributed development. At the same time, git also has a terrible CLI, combined with unnecessarily complexity like staging, stashes, rebase states, etc. This has been true from the beginning. Mercurial was built at the same time (also by a linux kernel dev!), and was generally considered to have a much better CLI and mental model. I think hg lost out despite that because it was slower than git, and didn't have Linus behind it.