Who is actually using Git without a central server involved?

Once upon a time I worked at an outsourcing company called Endava, in Bucharest. I was one of the "benched" engineers (basically hired as an Erlang engineer and kept around without work to be available once the client needed me, so I could jump in immediately; this is how they operate).

One of the guys I had lunch with, outside of my project's team (the aquarium as it was known) told me the story, that they had a new project, the client gave them the archive of the code, but even though they requested Gitlab access, they have not received anything for 2 weeks and they were tired of copy pasting files in between their laptops.

What I did was to install a Linux VM on one of their laptops, set up a bare git repository in there, showed how to use the domain name associated with their laptop on the internal network as a git remote, and have them use it as a "local" git setup. They loved it!

I'm really proud of that moment :)

EDIT: this might not be 100% local, and you still technically have a server (the VM), but is close I think. I do use a local git with a bare repo in my ~ that is backed up to a USB stick for throwaway projects sometimes.

When I first started at my current job some twelve years ago we would git pull from each other's machines directly. Everyone working on master, no pull requests, no definite HEAD. Real Wild West. Worked ok with a small tightly knit team.

That didn't last long though, we migrated to a central server with a bare git repo over SSH, and from there to a self hosted internally developed system, to self hosted Gitlab, eventually landing on just standard GitHub. It's been a ride.

The dream of truly decentralized VC is nice, and it's actually somewhat workable, but the downsides are many.

I have to admit that I have few project that are just local.

I was using it locally for mostly personal projects before I switched to fossil.

All the time