Briefly, git pull is a tool I use everyday, but git pull --rebase means something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Adding the --rebase flag will still run git fetch in the first step, but it changes the git merge to git rebase in the second step.

I prefer merge commits and rarely, if ever, use squash or rebase. But if you want or need a linear Git commit history, you'll want rebase, while merge commits are inherently non-linear.