My understanding is that git and mercurial were created independently around the same time, so in a world where Torvalds didn't create git we'd probably all use hg. Although, it isn't super hard to imagine him still working in system software and eventually creating git under almost the same circumstances, just that it would be used on a BSD rather than Linux.
I studied CS in the university and there was that guy who was a computer geek (out of very little among my fellow students), but actually was just your average gamer with close to zero knowledge of anything computer beyond double-clicking the shortcut to CS / Half-Life / WarCraft / Dota / whatever else was popular back then.
I met him 15 years later. We had some casual chat about this and that. And at some point he said—
Well, I have to give you a bit more of the context. He was a junior front-end (React, ofc) developer at that point. Yes, 15 years later! He just arrived into the profession due to his wild incompetence. Although he sold himself as a senior to the company! Still, he was very incompetent, and I had those wild eyes of wondering how on Earth some company would even hire such a guy, not to say giving him a senior role!
He was talking about this front-end thing. That there’s that other OS, Ubuntu, and he thinks he’ll try it instead of Windows. As drumroll for some reason (for some reason!) this git thing works better on Ubuntu than it works on Windows. My first try of Linux was like 15 to 20 years before the talk, so I was like spilling my coffee on him with laughing.
And here is your comment, casually pretending everyone on HN is aware of that history of git. And that it’s that git guy is somehow related to this Ubuntu thing, you know.
Mercurial was also created by a Linux kernel developer, and started development a few days after Git (the reason was that Linux had previously been using BitKeeper for version control but BitKeeper stopped offering free licenses).
