Git has a lot of warts, but if I were to pick an alternative it would be Fossil, not Mercurial.
I believe Meta’s implementation includes server components (Mononoke) that were not open-sourced, or at least not buildable without closed-source dependencies. Same with Microsoft’s fork of git that relies on a virtual filesystem, but that one is open-sourced, if for Windows, not Linux.
Mercurial is dead unfortunately. It's been stuck on Python 2. The CLI was saner than Git but it needed Python, which helped with our (better) decision to pick Fossil instead. This was 11 years ago. It's been great, it has everything you need in a single executable which can be statically compiled.
> Mercurial is dead unfortunately. It's been stuck on Python 2.
Mercurial adopted Python 3 a while ago. Not to mention, huge chunks of it have been rewritten in Rust.
Mercurial has continued to get new features like Changeset Evolution [1] that once you use it, you wonder why all version control systems don’t have it.
Mercurial runs on Python 3 just fine and has been for a while. In fact, starting with Mercurial 6.2 (from July 2022), Python 2 is no longer supported [1].
I believe Meta’s implementation includes server components (Mononoke) that were not open-sourced, or at least not buildable without closed-source dependencies. Same with Microsoft’s fork of git that relies on a virtual filesystem, but that one is open-sourced, if for Windows, not Linux.