In April 2005, Monotone became the subject of increased interest in the FOSS community after Linus Torvalds mentioned it as a possible replacement for BitKeeper in the Linux development process.

Git has a much stronger focus on high performance, inspired by the lengthy history and demanding distributed modes of collaboration used by Torvalds and the other Linux kernel authors.

And quite frankly, as a result of all these design decisions that sound so appealing to some CS people, the end result is a horrible and unmaintainable mess.A key issue debated[6] was whether the replacement of BitKeeper should support cherry picking, whereby a tree maintainer can approve a subset of patches while rejecting others on an individual basis.

He further argued that Monotone is correct in its aversion to cherry-picking as a feature, but then failed to take it far enough by not making it easy enough to "throw away" unclean working trees after their purpose is served.

[7] Torvalds also noted his perception that Monotone at that time had not achieved the performance level required by a project as large as Linux kernel development.

Like GNU arch, and unlike Subversion, Monotone takes a distributed approach to version control.

[citation needed] Monotone is especially strong in its support for a diverge/merge workflow, which it achieves in part by always allowing commit before merge.