Yeah, I originally had some Linus snark in there but deleted it. My above comment is being rapidly downvoted though, which is in some sense validating.

That's a pretty big claim. Git solved real problems at the time in a novel and extremely useful way. Coming from SVN (or god forbid VSS), the power and flexibility of git more than made up for its difficulty to grasp.

Why it "won" over alternatives with cleaner UX (eg Hg) is a different question, and I think has a lot to do with github.

Git may solve real problems but honestly, it's a PITA to use. Just for basic tasks needs quite a lot time sink to understand what's going on and what do you need to do.

It gets in the way of the workflow IMO.

Mercurial came out essentially simultaneously, solved the same problems, with a much more coherent UX.

Early on, I was definitely a proponent for hg over git. I assumed it would at the very least remain a peer, given how much more sane the UX is. I was wrong though, and I don't think it's just because of github.

Named branches being baked in turned out to actually be a real pain in mercurial. Sure, you can use bookmarks (and we did) but starts to quickly feel like you're swimming against the current.

It's bigger than him. GitHub built their SaaS on top of it. Had they chosen subversion or fossil, history would be very different.

People use git because everybody else uses git and it started because GitHub provides easy code sharing and a better UI than the alternative — SourceForge and mailing lists.

People could have kept using SVN or whatever else. They jumped ship in droves, way before GitHub.

At the time it was the only distributed and open source VCS. Fossil may have come quickly on its heels, but it was already too late.

[delayed]

And others were released before git:

> The first open-source DVCS systems included Arch, Monotone, and Darcs. However, open source DVCSs were never very popular until the release of Git and Mercurial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control#Hi...