Comment by jonathanlydall
1 day ago
If you’re making local commits (or local branch, or local merge, etc), you’re leveraging the distributed nature of Git. With SVN all these actions required being done on the server. This meant if you were offline and were thinking of making a risky change you might want to back out of, there was no way on SVN to make an offline commit which you could revert to if you wanted.
Of course if you’re working with others you will want a central Git server you all synchronize local changes with. GitHub is just one of many server options.
I'm pretty sure that if required, SVN could be updated to have an 'offline mode' where more offline operations would be allowed, since it keeps a local shadow copy of the last repository state from the server anyway. But offline mode simply isn't all that necessary anymore. How often is an average programmer in an area without any mobile coverage or other means of internet connectivity?
Shortly after git became popular, the Subversion team released a tool that enabled replicating a SVN repository or any subset to a local independent repository, which could be used for local development and re-synced to the main repository at any time.