In my previous job, I taught darcs to a designer/graphics artist. It took about half an hour to go through the CLI, and after that he used it successfully and asked me maybe a pair of questions ever.
Now the guy was pretty technical (part of his job was AS development), but he was not a developer.
Darcs's and Git's fundamentals are not that different[0], but Darcs's CLI actually makes sense in and of itself independent from the implementation details, and when it diverges from the older standard (e.g. SVN) it's so that commands make more sense, not less. Meanwhile Git has taken pretty much the opposite tack.
Git's porcelain is a giant steaming roasted turd sandwich, no other DVCS has such a complex, hostile and nonsensical CLI that people tell you you're supposed to learn it from the storage model up and then it'll make sense.
Don't try to shift the buck to VCS/DVCS concepts, while they are complex Git's CLI goes a great way towards making them nonsensical to beginners and non-beginners alike. I routinely used three different DVCS before I had to take the plunge into Git, and it was still a fucking pain in the ass. And that's a problem at every level of resolutions, just compare the hot mess that is gitrevisions(7) to mercurial's (more powerful, more flexible, more readable and more regular) revsets. It's not like revsets are a genius's flash of inspiration either, "hey I'm trying to manipulate sets of revisions, how about I manipulate them as sets?" We're not talking turing award worthy discovery here.
[0] well they kinda are, but by and large the fundamental differences are irrelevant to basic day-to-day use.
That's why we picked fossil over git. The interface is really sane and you can also do stuff from the browser. It gets out of your way. You do not need Python, it can be statically linked easily. It also works on Windows. The usability experience is akin to Mercurial, but even easier to use. Unfortunately it doesn't quie work for bigger projoects (think the Linux kernel or the FreeBSD ports tree) and it can also get slower once you have a lot of history. The repo is esentially a SQLite db.
Now the guy was pretty technical (part of his job was AS development), but he was not a developer.
Darcs's and Git's fundamentals are not that different[0], but Darcs's CLI actually makes sense in and of itself independent from the implementation details, and when it diverges from the older standard (e.g. SVN) it's so that commands make more sense, not less. Meanwhile Git has taken pretty much the opposite tack.
Git's porcelain is a giant steaming roasted turd sandwich, no other DVCS has such a complex, hostile and nonsensical CLI that people tell you you're supposed to learn it from the storage model up and then it'll make sense.
Don't try to shift the buck to VCS/DVCS concepts, while they are complex Git's CLI goes a great way towards making them nonsensical to beginners and non-beginners alike. I routinely used three different DVCS before I had to take the plunge into Git, and it was still a fucking pain in the ass. And that's a problem at every level of resolutions, just compare the hot mess that is gitrevisions(7) to mercurial's (more powerful, more flexible, more readable and more regular) revsets. It's not like revsets are a genius's flash of inspiration either, "hey I'm trying to manipulate sets of revisions, how about I manipulate them as sets?" We're not talking turing award worthy discovery here.
[0] well they kinda are, but by and large the fundamental differences are irrelevant to basic day-to-day use.