My first love when it comes to distributed source control systems was Mercurial. It was powerful, simple, and it had excellent Windows client. Compared to Source Safe and CVS I was using before, it was a heaven.
While I first dabbled with local repositories, it wasn't too long until I found BitBucket. As it was free for up to five users it seemed like a perfect home for many of my projects - both public and private. Yes, Git was getting popular at the same time but I preferred Mercurial. However, as more and more people started using Git, I switched.
Even when I switched to Git, I still continued keeping some projects on BitBucket - especially those where I collaborated with other users. It was simply much easier to get them used to TortoiseHg than to Git. For inexperienced user there was a real benefit in all restrictions Mercurial had by default.
Unfortunately, less than a year from now BitBucket will kill off Mercurial support.
I fully understand them. There was simply not enough Mercurial users out there to make it work. Even when I look at my own repositories, Mercurial is only a small fraction of my commits. However, I am still sad to see an old friend gone.
My guess I'll convert most of my remaining repositories to Git. Considering how integrated Git got over the years with other tools, I am sure quite a few of shared repositories will go Git route too. For rest, I guess I'll need to find another home.