My first experience with a VCS was using Mercurial, about a decade ago. In that time, I've only had at most three or four instances where I so borked the repository that I had to destroy it and start again. This includes the time when I didn't know anything about VCS and was liable to foot-gun myself. I probably first used Git about 5, 6 years ago, and, despite using it at a much reduced frequency (virtually all my git usage is via hg-git nowadays), I've easily had a dozen times where it was easier to blow away a repository than fix it.
Obviously, heavy prior experience with Mercurial does color one's views about UX, but the experience with Git that I have had--and that I have seen many others concur with--is that the UX makes it way too easy to get you in states that you don't know what to do. But that's not the biggest flaw with Git. The biggest flaw is the community: when you don't know what to do, and you start trying to find the answer, instead of being told "this is how you fix it," you instead get a lecture on the full internals of Git, and why the crazy incantation should be really obvious to any user. Is it any surprise that one would find it easier to blow away the directory and recreate the five-line build system fix whose merge conflict caused the mess in the first place?
Your comment is a picture-perfect of this community hostility that I see with Git that I don't see with other VCS. There definitely seems to be a sentiment that there is One True Way™ to do things, and if you're not doing it like that, you are wrong. I care to disagree: a VCS is a tool--it should support my workflow, not dictate it. I find that the community around Mercurial is much more in agreement with the philosophy I hold, and unsurprisingly, I've generally found Mercurial to be superior than Git.
Obviously, heavy prior experience with Mercurial does color one's views about UX, but the experience with Git that I have had--and that I have seen many others concur with--is that the UX makes it way too easy to get you in states that you don't know what to do. But that's not the biggest flaw with Git. The biggest flaw is the community: when you don't know what to do, and you start trying to find the answer, instead of being told "this is how you fix it," you instead get a lecture on the full internals of Git, and why the crazy incantation should be really obvious to any user. Is it any surprise that one would find it easier to blow away the directory and recreate the five-line build system fix whose merge conflict caused the mess in the first place?
Your comment is a picture-perfect of this community hostility that I see with Git that I don't see with other VCS. There definitely seems to be a sentiment that there is One True Way™ to do things, and if you're not doing it like that, you are wrong. I care to disagree: a VCS is a tool--it should support my workflow, not dictate it. I find that the community around Mercurial is much more in agreement with the philosophy I hold, and unsurprisingly, I've generally found Mercurial to be superior than Git.