SVN is a versioned storage engine pretending to be source control. Branching and tagging? We'll just expect everyone to obey an implied policy in our filesystem tree. Oh you think you want to merge these things that have a clear ancestor in the DAG? Not so fast buddy.

IIRC, merging in SVN is... basically something you never wanted to do. :)

Svn's complete inability to handle merges at a file level may have been simpler, but was by no means better. Needing to coordinate who is allowed to edit each file in order to avoid a painful merge is common with svn, and nearly unheard of with git. Svn looks at the inherent complexity of multiple people working on the same code base, shrugs, and figures that it is somebody else's problem.

> Things were much simpler with svn.

Not from my experience as a newbie with SVN at the start of uni and in the beginning at $job.

In both cases, it was temperamental, prone to network issues (this was in both student accom. -> uni server, and LAN at $job) and did not like users working on the same files.

Git took some learning, and it took reading Git Magic <http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/> to go from <https://xkcd.com/1597/> to the friend mentioned in the alt text.

SVN still feels like I'm pulling teeth all these years later.