Ask Experienced Devs

There is pijul.

1. Pijul's defining feature is its innovative algebra of patches model for version control, allowing changes to be applied in any order without creating conflicts, thus simplifying collaborative work.
2. It efficiently handles branches and merges, with its patch theory often enabling it to automatically resolve conflicts, eliminating much of the headache typically associated with merge conflicts.
3. Pijul is also free and open-source

Check this out: https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/05/23/for-those-who-just-dont-git-it-ep-573/

Git is definitely dominating the landscape. The fact that it is free software plays a big role. There are alternatives, but they are unlikely to gain much adoption. They may provide slightly better UX or marginally more comfortable flows, but it's not enough to replace Git. Not to mention, most developers don't even really care about which SCM they use.

There’s perforce which is primarily used for game development. Often games have a lot of binary files that are hard/impossible to generate diffs of unlike text based files. Perforce requires you to check out individual files and prevents any merge conflicts on an individual file basis.

I actually kind of miss Subversion etc now. Git was perfectly designed for open source projects, but its easy branching model has significantly undermined the practice of Continuous Integration in enterprise environments. I get that maybe devs just prefer working in an isolated branch, but something has been lost.

Domains like CAD use revision control, if you're looking for a rabbit hole to a parallel world to get lost in on a Sunday. It's not to be completely confused with RCS that predated VCS.

Mercurial (hg) is a fine alternative that was widely adopted in the early 2010s, but has gradually lost mind share to git. Actually every company that I worked for in the 2010s had a Mercurial service (maybe unloved). I think companies adopted it because command line hg is closer to svn, and more obvious in general, so it was an easier migration from svn. I also think out-of-the-box hgserve is easier to understand than git serve, so before tools like GitLab and Gitea it was easier to host on-prem.

Mercurial's data model is indistinguishable from git, and IIRC it even slightly pre-dates git. The main thing git had going for it was GitHub, but that was enough to build a positive feedback loop and come to dominate the mindshare.

Some people that require support for a lot of big binary assets probably use something else.

There is only one alternative for distributed version control, Mercurial. Everything else is significantly inferior, except maybe for special cases. Mercurial may be fine for newcomers to step in, but probably at some point the flexibility of Git will be missed. And because of so many people using Git there are more solutions to specific problems.

I've heard of some corporate environments using different tools because of some weird use case, but honestly I think it doesn't justify, if you're taking it seriously you should be using git.

Git is freaking amazing. Any current alternative is going to be a joke next to it.

People using other ones are simply missing out. SVN/CVS just need to die.