Mercurial is actually more or less equivalent to git. You just need to activate some plugins for, say, rebasing. (I do prefer git, though, for religious reasons.)
I've tried using darcs a few years ago (it was my first DVCS system, actually). Did they fix the exponential runtimes one got occasionally? If yes, I'd probably give it another go.
It may have improved a lot recently, but the one project I was using Darcs on had this workflow:
1. Pull revisions 2. Discover local workspace was corrupted. 3. Delete local workspace and restart.
I'm not a fan of Darcs either. :)
Corrupted how? (the repo data in the _darcs/ dir, or your local working copy?) I've used darcs extensively for years and have never experienced this.
Re:A List Apart: Get started with Git
by ryanpetrich on Tuesday November 02, 2010 @07:44PM
(#1862933)
The return of SourceSafe.
Yes, darcs 2.0 fixed it or at least drastically minimized it. The problems occurred when there were lots of conflicts between patches. If you try to minimize conflicts (getting often, amending conflicting patches before pushing them) then you'll never run into the problem, even with the old darcs.
The only non-git DVCS I'd even consider or recommend is darcs--its model is different enough to make it much better for certain workflows than git. It is also incredibly easy to understand and dead simple to use.