Mercurial is a fantastic VCS system that helped me get 'into" DVCS, and for that I am thankful. Even in 2013, it feels like it has the superior windows interface in TortoiseHG and I loved how extensions for Mercurial were usually a lot more cross-platform than git since they were usually just written in Python.<p>That said, once I got my head around the full ramifications of Git's lightweight branching, I still think it was the better choice over named branches and bookmarks. When learning Mercurial, SVN-minded me naturally gravitated towards branches for everything because of the name, and learning the distinction of when to use bookmarks and when to use branches wasn't exactly clear until I finally understood how Git's branches worked - and at that point the thought of enshrining branch names in the history forevermore suddenly turned from an obvious "why not?" to a "why?". Git's interface can always get better, but Mercurial will always have branches that live forever in history and are named "Branches".<p>Still, in Bizarro-2013 where Git never existed or never got the boost from Github, I think Mercurial would have been just as serviceable, and I think that it's a great second option to present if you want to migrate to a DVCS but your teammates can't get their head around Git. Kudos to them on another release.