I agree. I use git on a daily basis, and I think I'm converging on some intermediate level of understanding, but I constantly find it difficult to use. I go backwards and forwards between wondering whether (after three decades as a developer) my brain is just too used to the SVN approach of centralised repositories and branches-are-directories -- and at the other extreme thinking that there is something unbalanced(?) about its abstractions and power.
For very large projects (eg Linux-scale or Windows-scale) I can totally see why it is the best versioning solution. But most software isn't like that: it's relatively small teams maintaining a legacy codebase and making fairly incremental enhancements. I struggle with what git brings to that vs the cognitive overhead of using it.
I've recently migrated a moderately large codebase from TFS to GitHub. A large part of what drove that was co-workers who were reluctant to use TFS - I suspect that they found it old-fashioned, and that kind of bothers me, even though git is clearly the future and TFS clearly isn't. I like diversity of tools, and tools that don't force me to think too hard about things that should be easy. The knowledge that git could turn into a foot-gun just when I most need to get things done, doesn't help.
<edit> After some consideration, I think what I'd like is a tool that gives me a simple SVN-style UX over a real git repo, with the option to drop down into actual git of necessary, and so that colleagues can use only git if they prefer. Github desktop partly achieves this, as does Visual Studio's git integration, but it's not quite what I want.</edit>
(Not a git hater. I've had a github account for over a decade and choose to use it a lot for personal projects. But mostly just simple, sequential check-ins over time.)
This take is surprising to me as I spent a decade using cvs/svn and at the end of that I didn’t really understand how it worked well enough to have any confidence branching and merging. Switching to git was a steep learning curve but made so much more conceptual sense that in a few months I was very confident in branching and merging and with a couple years had a deep and intuitive understanding of rebasing. Git allows me to edit my work before I push it, committing early and often to help my local development, then editing and packaging into atomic and well-documented commits that will make sense years down the line without wading through the irrelevant hiccups that were part of the short-term development cycle.
I won’t defend the git porcelain because it is incredibly baroque, but because it’s backed by a robust a simple data model underneath I see that as more of a rote memorization challenge than a fundamental flaw. This is far preferable to svn which conflates repos, directories, branches and tags, resulting in the possibility of nonsensical operations and unresolvable merge situations.
For very large projects (eg Linux-scale or Windows-scale) I can totally see why it is the best versioning solution. But most software isn't like that: it's relatively small teams maintaining a legacy codebase and making fairly incremental enhancements. I struggle with what git brings to that vs the cognitive overhead of using it.
I've recently migrated a moderately large codebase from TFS to GitHub. A large part of what drove that was co-workers who were reluctant to use TFS - I suspect that they found it old-fashioned, and that kind of bothers me, even though git is clearly the future and TFS clearly isn't. I like diversity of tools, and tools that don't force me to think too hard about things that should be easy. The knowledge that git could turn into a foot-gun just when I most need to get things done, doesn't help.
<edit> After some consideration, I think what I'd like is a tool that gives me a simple SVN-style UX over a real git repo, with the option to drop down into actual git of necessary, and so that colleagues can use only git if they prefer. Github desktop partly achieves this, as does Visual Studio's git integration, but it's not quite what I want.</edit>
(Not a git hater. I've had a github account for over a decade and choose to use it a lot for personal projects. But mostly just simple, sequential check-ins over time.)