Maybe you’re young, but git is better than all of the other shit before it.

Try to come up with something simpler than git, and you’ll end up with something like SVN or CVS that struggled with more than a couple of people working on the same files.

Try to make something that is more content aware, and you’ll find out how git got its name in the first place.

Mercurial is simpler than git. It is (or was) just too damn slow

For some people. Back when I only knew how to use subversion, I tried out both git and mercurial, and found mercurial confusing while git clicked immediately.

Unfortunately it's been long enough I don't remember details why, just that it was something with how it handled branches.

Mercurial has both "real" branches (history is kept so you can always tell what revisions were in what branch) as well as git "branch is just a pointer tag"

So really you can choose whatever suits your needs.

Personally the things I love about mercurial are:

    more consistent commandline (that's the simple part others bring up)
    revsets (awesome query language for revisions, there's also filesets, but I don't use that as much)
    absorb  (I think someone added a git extension that does something similar a few months ago)
    fa --deleted 
    grep --all  
    phases ♥

Mercurial and perforce are a better solution for anything with a centralised repo IMO

A folder with a list of files is a tool to store versions of text. Git is somewhat more useful.