The blogger makes a few good points. I think part of the problem is that he seemed to expect TortoiseHg to hold his hand a little bit more while he was learning

The blogger makes a few good points. I think part of the problem is that he seemed to expect TortoiseHg to hold his hand a little bit more while he was learning to use mercurial. Instead TortoiseHg expects you to have a basic understanding of the main mercurial concepts (i.e. clone vs push, etc). If you do I think the experience is much smoother, since we have been careful to follow mercurial's naming convenctions and workflow when possible. In addition TortoiseHg has a pretty good (IMHO) online help that goes through some of these concepts and perhaps going through it would have helped him... Regardless I agree that the initial "new user" experience could be better and that expecting a user to RTFM is probably naive these days... Out of the issues that are raised in that blog post I think the "No URL" one is the most serious. TortoiseHg should make it easy for you to understand and fix the problem. I am looking into it and hopefully it will be better handled on the next version of TortoiseHg (2.4). What I plan to do, other than improving the error message itself, is to show the "Sync widget" whenever a user tries to push without having configured a remote repository first. Please let me know of any other problems or improvements that you'd like to see, and I'll see if we can do something about them.