Why did Git become so popular?
- by Jungle Hunter
Almost every article you read comparing Git and Mercurial it seems like Mercurial has a better command line UX with each command being limited to one idea only (unlike say git checkout). But at some point Git suddenly became super popular and literally exploded.
Source: Debian
What happened in 2010-01 that things suddenly changed. Looks like GitHub was founded earlier than that - 2008.
Edit: Git 1.7.0 seems to be released at the same time: January 2012. Here are the 1.7.0 release notes and the file history with the corresponding dates.