Perhaps the search trends are more an indication of how often people shoot themselves in the foot with git and have to search for a way to unshoot their feet vs. how seldom that happens with hg.

Or perhaps they're reflecting GitHub's dominance in the forge space and the fact that they only offer git, so a whole lot of people are more-or-less forced to learn something about git, so searches...

Or perhaps they're reflecting something about hg users preferring other search-engines than Google...

Drawing any sort of conclusive correlation between those Google search trends and actual usage or desire to use one or other distributed VCS is a fool's game.

Isn't Facebook investing heavily? I'm more interested in 'good' than popular, when it comes to virtually all personal tech decisions and am inspired by this thread to try out Mercurial, especially as I want to move everything to a sourcehut/sr.ht instance.

So does Mozilla.

I hope you're not just justifying to yourself why you shouldn't learn about something new and interesting.

I'm well aware that everything is git.

This doesn't mean that everything should be git.

Mercurial seems to be a "nicer" version of git, which doesn't seem to be enough of a difference to avoid the git bandwagon.

Projects like pijul interest me, since they work in a fundamentally different way. Pijul is a "nicer" version of darcs. Git killed darcs not by being nicer but by being faster, and pijul is also faster than darcs, so maybe there's hope ;)

(Of course, most of git's momentum came from huge projects using it, like Linux and Xorg; yet being huge is precisely what forced those projects to favour speed at the cost of "niceness". If a "nice" system existed that was fast enough to handle Linux, Torvalds would probably never have written git).