> Coming from mercurial (which is older than git)

Git is older than mercurial by 12 days. Bazaar has git beat by about the same amount of time. The major DVCSes all came out within a month of each other.

> But Linus pushed git and people followed like sheep.

I don't think this is true. Until around 2010-2011 or so, projects moving to DVCS seemed to pick up not git but mercurial. The main impetus I think was not Linux choosing git but the collapse of alternate code hosting places other than GitHub, which essentially forced git.

way way back in the day I did some digging into all three - and picked bazaar for my personal projects. that didn't last long lol