Branches are distinct.

Let’s say you have a main and a dev branch, and you periodically merge dev into main. Because of fast forwarding (on by default) the main branch is completely gone from the history. If you then add bug fixes and project branches it becomes a tangled mess really quickly and it’s nearly impossible to understand the structure by looking at the tree.

On mercurial every branch is named and distinct forever. You don’t have to try to understand what happened to the project since it’s obvious by looking at the tree.

Now there are ways to have a clean git history, but afaik you either need to make sure nobody ever messes it up or have everyone rebase everything and only keep the history of the main branch.

When working in a hyper structured organization that may work, but for more casual developers (scientists, students) that aren’t system experts and where you have messy history, mercurial default settings are less confusing, easier to learn and produce better results.

It makes the history clearer.

Surely it could be rewritten in Fortran if performance is really a concern.

No, git has labels on heads of branches. Once the head moves you loose the information. It also makes for a more messy history, which I believe created the whole “rebase everything” philosophy to cope.

So is Arch btw

Care to explain your comment for a layman?

From my limited experience mercurial is way more intuitive than git. The big one is named branches are a thing instead of an abstraction.

It’s a cruise ship. Put him in the cadaver closet.

Yeah that got me too!

I do the same but Egyptian

I use Egyptian gods!

Mint has a bunch of tweaks to make it more approachable. Apt assumes Sudo, typing passwords shows stars, little things that usually trip new users.

You already have great answers, so I’ll just drop my recommendations. LMDE if you want something more stable, and Endeavour OS if you want to go a bit more in the weeds with a rolling release.

In the end, don’t be afraid to try some for a few weeks and find one you like. One of the strength of Linux is that if you mess up, you can always reinstall,and it’s not scary since you did it once already.

Just use LMDE.

School kids have to swear allegiance to it every day. Of course USians are obsessed with the flag.

The Prince of Persia movie. Also God’s of Egypt.

Some loose change from my dad to buy lunch at school.

I use the same one! It’s really great. I spent an hour going though the options untill I was satisfied.

If you go in the add-ons you can download themes that completely change the UI. They can also be heavily customized. Useless menus can just be removed.

Love LSD. I always install it first with btop and zoxide

You have to confirm any command before it runs, so no more dangerous than baseline rm