SVN was the reason most people when I was in college didn't use source control at all. It was painful to install on Windows. There weren't good hosts for it. (CSV at least had bad old SourceForge.) Once you had it installed and had settled on a host computer (and SVN needs a host), configuring your repositories in it was a whole new mess. SVN is definitely not "simpler".

With git you can install and git init anywhere and go you have source control. Moving commits to another machine gets us into the complications way above of learning GitHub and tools for GitHub, but in terms of 0-60 on "start a repository so you can commit changes" it's really hard to beat.