Btw, the risk of trying out other modern version control systems is nearly as low: most of them are compatible with git and you can convert back and forth. That definitely includes mercurial etc.
People tried mercurial. They went back to git.
Not some. I mean, even the few source code repository services that supported mercurial started dropping it.
See Bitbucket's announcement:
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/bitbucket/sunsetting-mercuria...
> According to a Stack Overflow Developer Survey, almost 90% of developers use Git, while Mercurial is the least popular version control system with only about 3% developer adoption. In fact, Mercurial usage on Bitbucket is steadily declining, and the percentage of new Bitbucket users choosing Mercurial has fallen to less than 1%.
I recently started a new job where the vanilla git CLI is the only git frontend installed on company servers, and the regressions in user-experience are painful :(
And I hope you do. It is so much better than git in every way. It enables working with stacks and the aforementioned megamerges so easily, allowing me to continue working forward while smaller units of work are reviewed/merged.
When I first tried to use jj, I wasn't entirely committed and switched between jj and git. Finally I hit a breaking point being fed up with stacks/merges and tried jj _for real_.
I recommend to give it a serious try for a few solid days and use it exclusively to really understand it. You won't go back.
The jj Discord is a very helpful place. Thanks to everyone there. Great article Isaac!