The definitive bittorrent client for Linux

So yeah, I've tried almost every bittorrent client out there for Linux. After many months of waiting for it to improve I gave Transmission another go, and surprisingly it worked quite good, although it's still banned on some trackers. I even built some packages for Ubuntu Edgy and Feisty, you can find those here.

So the experience with Transmission was a good one, but it didn't go without its bumps. The first point against it is that it's still banned from many private trackers and I'm a member of quite a few, so that's a no no for me. The other thing that happened is that after a while it refused to build on my machine (I was using the svn version). I haven't tried to build it again, but oh well, I've found a better alternative anyway.

The next candidate was Deluge. This is a very nice client, but it is way too unstable to be my main client. Another thing that I didn't like was the inability to disable DHT, something that is mandatory on most private trackers. That and the low speeds that I always got persuaded me to try another client.

Enter KTorrent, one of the best clients on this roundup. It has a lot of useful features like DHT, a built-in search engine among other things. This one worked almost perfectly, although the speeds weren't the best. That and it was banned from one of my favorite trackers and due to this I moved on.

I needed a nice looking client with a clean interface that showed just the necessary. I didn't need a bloated interface with 55 columns showing me everything it can. I don't want to know what bit the thing is downloading right now. I don't need a percentage calculator and a progress bar, one is enough. I also wanted control. Not so much that I get lost in menus that show me things that I don't know the meaning of, but enough to get the best performa

So, if you have read this blog before then you might remember my "An even better bittorrent client for Linux" article in which I reviewed qBittorrent. Well, I too remembered it and went ahead and downloaded the latest version. Good news people, they now provide a repository for us Ubuntu users, so we have it easy with the updates and quick bug-fix releases.

Well, for me this is the definitive bittorrent client for Linux. Why? Well, for onc, its interface is very clean and it presents you the information you need to know, simple and to the point. It also allows you to control the most important things, like which port it should listen too, maximum and minimum speeds of torrents, the maximum connection number, etc. Another thing I like is that it allows you to set a fixed share ratio for all torrents, so when your torrents reach that share ratio they will automatically stop seeding.

qBittorrent also allows you to enable or disable DHT and PeX (Peer Exchange). This is a really great feature every bittorrent client that wants to take itself seriously should have. Another cool thing is that you can tell qBittorrent to check a certain directory in your computer to fetch new torrents automatically so you don't have to add them by hand. All this and the fact that its constantly developed and updated with new features make it my client of choice on any Linux distribution. Even if there isn't a package available for it it is not difficult to build from source. Pardus users just have to install QT4 and export some environment variables, its all in the readme. All in all, this is a very solid and very good bittorrent client, try it out!