Why would their product marketing manager be bashing Git with accusations like Windows support is a "completely separate project" when it's the first download link on git-scm.com?
This is a very thoughtless article full of issues of personal taste and FUD towards Git. I was starting to really like Atlassian since they added free private Git repos on bitbucket.org. We've been considering using JIRA and other paid services from them where I work, but this gives me serious pause.
Not that I'm biased here (I use git and am more than happy on it), but git on Windows is an abomination as compared to Mercurial. Other than the sometimes complex commandline statements, it's one of git's bigger problems.
I use Git regularly--and happily--on Windows with very few issues. It is considerably slower than its Mac/Linux builds, but aside from that the experience has been positive.
What exactly do you consider to be Git's failings on Windows? And how is Mercurial superior in those respects?
I haven't used git on Windows for some time now so maybe things have changed, but at that time, it was pretty obvious that Mercurial was a polished first-class citizen of the Windows platform while git was an incomplete port (and in git's defense, I don't believe "make it work on Windows" was ever a design consideration when it was written).
I presume things have changed since then but it wasn't always the case.
Git for windows basically brings half of MinGW with it including a shell and pisses up your windows cmd settings terribly. There is no platform abstraction layer in Git, so you're stuck with dragging GNU with you (it's not even POSIX compliant).
Mercurial is far more respectiful as it uses Python as the platform abstraction layer, uses windows semantics quite happily and considered Windows very early on.
Mercurial is just more polished on Windows.
Also the IDE integration and tooling on Windows is an order of magnitude better. It just works with no fannying around.
Add to that it's considerably less cryptic than Git and it's won.
I struggled with Git on Windows for months, I really don't remember all the problems I had right now, but here are some:
Proxy support:
Setting up git to work under a proxy was a pain. I had to switch my proxy configuration all the time due to the company firewall and I remember had lots of throttle making Git recognize it.
Integration with other tools:
Since the windows Git requires a custom shell, its harder to integrate with other tools E.g. I had to track down and fix issues like this: https://github.com/fschulze/mr.developer/pull/53
SSH:
It required putty pageant! the horror! getting SSH to work under a proxy was impossible.
Mercurial is superior because it's easier to port to other platforms, probably because its written in Python instead of C and shell scripts. Mercurial doesn't requires a MinGW hack in order to run.
I have recently switched from Windows to Ubuntu full-time, and one of the few programs I'm sorely missing is TortoiseGit. Just like its hg counterpart, it made working with git a pleasure, and it took a while to adapt to the command-only style of work.
This is a very thoughtless article full of issues of personal taste and FUD towards Git. I was starting to really like Atlassian since they added free private Git repos on bitbucket.org. We've been considering using JIRA and other paid services from them where I work, but this gives me serious pause.