I used Fossil for about 4 months on a project. Found it easier than git in terms of CLI usability. The inbuilt UI, although not polished, is pretty usable. And the entire project is pretty much a single SQLite file. It definitely hasn't gotten the attention it deserves.
P.S: It's primary author is known for another piece of software that runs pretty much everywhere - SQLite!
If your experience was more than about half a year old, you might want to look at it again. The default skin changed recently to one that is much more of a modern web UI.
It is easy to switch the skin on an existing repository or to customize it to behave the way you like. Fossil currently ships with 10 distinct skins, by my count.
The problem of fossil UI is not a skin. Why that annoying commit hashes are so big? Do you really read them first? Take a look at github UI: every button and label have meaningful place and polished. And that is the problem of most github clones - they forgot to hire a designer.
In most places, Fossil shows an abbreviated form of the hash, typically 8-10 characters since Fossil, like Git, will accept any unique prefix of an artifact hash to refer to that artifact.
and here is a Fossil timeline page, which serves much the same purpose:
http://fossil-scm.org/index.html/timeline
In the fossil case, the hashes are one character longer, and enclosed in square brackets instead of a roundrect.
This is a serious complaint?
> Do you really read them first?
No, you ignore them completely until you need to refer to one, and then you copy-paste it, just like with Git.
> every button and label have meaningful place and polished
Which button or label in the default Fossil skin is not in a meaningful place, and which shows a lack of polish? Be specific.
> they forgot to hire a designer.
I'm pretty sure the differences between the two stem not from forgetfulness but from the fact that GitHub, Inc. employs 608 people, is closed source, and has a revenue model, whereas Fossil is a side project of a company that's probably 1/100 that size and grows mainly by open source user code contributions.
P.S: It's primary author is known for another piece of software that runs pretty much everywhere - SQLite!