Mercurial is slow and unpopular, and it may never be made fast enough to compete with Git. I learned it once upon a time (when I barely knew Git) and thought the UI was marginally better. But now that I have used Git for a while and learned more, I think Git is way superior technologically and in terms of features.
I wouldn't fault anyone for liking Mercurial, but it definitely isn't better than Git except in giving a superficially better impression in its user interface. Once you get past initial impressions and start to do more advanced things, Mercurial sucks. There's good reasons why Mercurial fell out of favor.
Before anyone tries to say Facebook uses Mercurial, I'm just gonna point out that their VCS seems to be an entirely different implementation of Mercurial compared to what is available publicly. And even then, the tech lead on that has said recently that they have performance problems to solve. I doubt if they ever will solve those problems because they are inherent to Mercurial's implementation. Fixing it would break compatibility with old repos, and take a hell of a lot of work.
In fairness, companies with an enormous codebase have great difficulties
with git as well.
Often end up developing their own hacks around git to make it work.
I wouldn't fault anyone for liking Mercurial, but it definitely isn't better than Git except in giving a superficially better impression in its user interface. Once you get past initial impressions and start to do more advanced things, Mercurial sucks. There's good reasons why Mercurial fell out of favor.
Before anyone tries to say Facebook uses Mercurial, I'm just gonna point out that their VCS seems to be an entirely different implementation of Mercurial compared to what is available publicly. And even then, the tech lead on that has said recently that they have performance problems to solve. I doubt if they ever will solve those problems because they are inherent to Mercurial's implementation. Fixing it would break compatibility with old repos, and take a hell of a lot of work.