Comment by barries11

I used Perforce a lot in the 90s, when it was simple (just p4, p4d, and p4merge!), super fast, and never crashed or corrupted itself. Way simpler, and easier to train newbies on, than any of the alternatives.

Subdirectories-as-branches (like bare repo + workspace-per-branch practices w/git) is so much easier for average computer users to grok, too. Very easy to admin too.

No idea what the current "enterprisey" offering is like, though.

For corporate teams, it was a game changer. So much better than any alternative at the time.

We're all so used to git that we've become used to it's terribleness and see every other system as deficient. Training and supporting a bunch of SWE-adjacent users (hw eng, ee, quality, managers, etc) is a really, really good reality check on how horrible the git UX and datamodel is (e.g. obliterating secrets--security, trade, or PII/PHI--that get accidentally checked in is a stop-the-world moment).

For the record, I happily use git, jj, and Gitea all day every day now (and selected them for my current $employer). However, also FTR, I've used SCCS, CVS, SVN, VSS, TFS and MKS SI professionally, each for years at a time.

All of the comments dismissing tools that are significantly better for most use cases other than distributed OSS, but lost the popularity contest, is shortsighted.

Git has a loooong way to go before it's as good in other ways as many of its "competitors". Learning about their benefits is very enlightening.

And, IIRC, p4 now integrates with git, though I've never used it.