Before git and mercurial I used CVS. It’s pretty easy to set up a server if you have ssh or telnet access. For personal things I used RCS because it was integrated nicely in emacs. So I think one needs to at least compare it to those.

RCS had almost no configuration required. It just wasn’t easily shareable. So, going to git costs cycles for personal projects with the hope of a return from better management of sets of changes, etc.