Four reasons, all dating back to when I started using VC. 1) The GUIs were better, especially on windows. I think that gap has closed some in the last few year

Four reasons, all dating back to when I started using VC. 1) The GUIs were better, especially on windows. I think that gap has closed some in the last few years, but I think hg still has an edge. 2) Bitbucket offered free private repos and was hg only when they started out 3) The command line semantics were less imposing 4) I happened to find some really good introductory literature for hg. I was a very, very green developer at the time so all of these points mattered a lot.