I never realized how much of a tool git users were before I knew there are 500 page books about it....
This whole thread is evidence of two opposing viewpoints: "git is too hard" and "git is powerful, professional tool and that requires some effort".
I believe those making the latter point misunderstand the first group (to which I belong): I'm not opposed to putting in some time to learn a tool that's central to my craft.
But git seems to often be complicated not because of the complexity of the underlying problems, but because of choices made in its implementation.
Consider: If you have a decent understand of information theory, you'll be able to use any database system within a short time, even if you never had heard of SQL before. Indeed, with a few years of SQL, you'll quickly understand NoSQL systems as well – coming from Postgres, I was productive in Redis within half an hour.
But no amount of experience with VCSs will allow you dive into git without hitting a brick wall.
Everybody who's ever forked a project on GitHub is using it as distributed version control, and that's a lot of people, so I don't know why you say almost no one actually does distributed version control.
I'm quite certain most of these are sure they are using github and see no difference between it and Git; and "version control" term gives them headaches in same way as "currying" or "first-class function".
This whole thread is evidence of two opposing viewpoints: "git is too hard" and "git is powerful, professional tool and that requires some effort".
I believe those making the latter point misunderstand the first group (to which I belong): I'm not opposed to putting in some time to learn a tool that's central to my craft.
But git seems to often be complicated not because of the complexity of the underlying problems, but because of choices made in its implementation.
Consider: If you have a decent understand of information theory, you'll be able to use any database system within a short time, even if you never had heard of SQL before. Indeed, with a few years of SQL, you'll quickly understand NoSQL systems as well – coming from Postgres, I was productive in Redis within half an hour.
But no amount of experience with VCSs will allow you dive into git without hitting a brick wall.