It is the unquestioningly better tool right now. It's available, stable, battle-tested and it's actively supported. It's a case of "being the change you want to see". Just use it. Claims that it lost are counterproductive. The implicit deterrence from those statements is what is actively keeping Mercurial's adoption low.

Hosting is available at least from Sourcehut and heptapod.host.

I'm running a private Heptapod instance (Gitlab fork with direct Mercurial support). It just works.

Are there any public forges that support hg?

Have a look at heptapost.host for paid hosting and foss.heptapod.net for free public hosting for OSS. Is that what you are looking for?

> Are there any public forges that support hg?

Sourceforge, Sourcehut, and GNU Savannah all support Mercurial.

I use it every day!

That sounds interesting. Does anyone have a GitHub link?

It's the slower tool.

That was relevant to Linus in the early 2000s, but then, we didn't have NVMe SSDs.

It is still noticeably slower on a large codebase.

I don’t mind if it is slightly slower, if that is even true anymore.

Turns out while hg clone, pull, or whatever is running, I can do other things!

Modern scum (members of depraved modern culture) always prefer what is worse over what is better, so of course they prefer Git over Mercurial. Anyone who wants Mercurial hosting can use my hosting: https://hg.reactionary.software/