Transmission BitTorrent Client - Lightweight Alternative to Deluge

Transmission is a lightweight BitTorrent client built in GTK, with a clean and simple interface. Although most people prefer more popular clients like Vuze, Deluge or KTorrent, Transmission incorporates all the major features one needs for downloading torrents and can prove a very good alternative to those, especially if you don't need all those whistles and bells.

Running in Ubuntu 9.04

Transmission comes with an intuitive interface which doesn't stay in the way of the user. It's been stripped of all the bloated other clients may have, but still it features:
- various useful information about the currently downloading torrent (global activity, peers, trackers, files)
- speed limiting options for downloading and uploading
- creation of your own torrents
- web interface
- pause/resume downloading

Transmission will also allow to sort torrents by share ratio, progress, name, downloaded time etc. and it provides a minimal mode (accessible through Ctrl+M), which will display less information about torrents.

Showing torrent info

Although it has no integrated searching capabilities, it has an option to automatically add torrents from a specified directory, so the downloads can be started automatically when saving a torrent file with your browser to that specified folder.

Another nice feature are desktop notifications, and also the possibility to connect to trackers via a proxy.

Overall, Transmission is a really good recommendation if you don't need a bigger, more bloated client. It integrates very well with GNOME and is far more lighter than Deluge or Vuze. It will do its job very well without giving you any hassle.

Overview: 5 BitTorrent Clients for Linux

Today I will continue the series of GUI applications reviews with 5 clients for the BitTorrent protocol. For those who want to read the previous articles in these series, here are the links:

14 Most Popular Text Editors for Linux
10 File Managers for Linux
12 Popular Audio Players for Linux - An Overview
8 Image Viewers for Ubuntu
5 Best Applications to Rip and Transcode DVDs in Linux

In this article I will leave command-line clients like rtorrent or ctorrent for some other time, focusing on KTorrent, Deluge, Transmission, Vuze and QBitTorrent.

Deluge
In my opinion, Deluge is KTorrent's counterpart for the GNOME environment. Written in GTK+2, Deluge offers all the features which a BitTorrent client should have: possibility to download only certain files in torrents, the ability to create your own torrents, lots of torrent information, queue manager and much more. Probably the most powerful and popular client for GNOME, so if you haven't tried it yet, give it a go! I wrote a full review here.
Homepage

Deluge 1.1.6

KTorrent
KTorrent is the most powerful BitTorrent client for both KDE3 and KDE4, offering advanced configuration options, plenty of features and a wealth of useful plugins, like the Search plugin which will allow you to search for torrents directly from within KTorrent. Here is the full review of the latest release, KTorrent 3.2.1.
Homepage

KTorrent 3.2.1

Transmission
Yet another GTK client for BitTorrent, Transmission offers a simple interface. I remember I tried Transmission almost an year ago, and it was a rather basic client, but this changed with the latest releases. It really is a good alternative to the more popular Deluge.
Homepage

Transmission 1.51

qBitTorrent
Built using the Qt4 toolkit, QBitTorrent's goal is to be lightweight, with a simple interface and ease of use, but also to offer powerful features in the same time. Among all the usual features, QBitTorrent also comes with support for trackerless torrents, a download queue, web interface, or tray integration (with the possibility to start it minimised to tray). You can also search for torrents directly from within the application, and by default it offers five default sites with the possibility to install new ones.
Homepage

qBitTorrent 1.3.1

Vuze
Written in Java and formerly known as Azureus, Vuze is a powerful, cross-platform BitTorrent client which comes with a futuristic interface and plenty features. It uses tabs for all of its operations, including configuring it, and when it starts it will focus a dashboard, showing recent activity and updates. Vuze also comes with integrated search for torrents and a large number of cool plugins, and everything is integrated into a futuristic, eye-appealing interface. However I found it to be the slowest of all the five clients.
Homepage

Vuze 3.1.1.0

Review: KTorrent 3.2.1 - Popular BitTorrent Client for KDE

A few days ago I reviewed Deluge, a powerful BitTorrent client for GNOME, so today I will continue in the same manner with the latest release of its KDE counterpart, the popular KTorrent.

Available for both KDE3 and KDE4, KTorrent is a fully-featured, complete and powerful client for the BitTorrent protocol. The latest version, 3.2.1, was released earlier this month and includes a lot of bug fixes and web seeding improvements.

KTorrent 3.2.1

KTorrent has been always the most popular client at least on KDE, including all the configuration options needed and a reasonable number of useful plugins to extend its functionality up to a full-blown BitTorrent client.

One of the most useful plugins is the ability to search on various torrent sites directly from within the application, without the need of an external web browser.

Searching on torrent sites directly from KTorrent

You can also easily add custom torrent sites if you're not satisfied with the default ones. Each search result is opened in a new tab inside KTorrent. Among the other plugins included are the DownloadOrder plugin (which allows to specify the order in which files belonging to the same torrent are downloaded), InfoWidget plugin (which will display useful information about a torrent in separate tabs), or the Syndication plugin, which supports both RSS and Atom feeds. These are not all though, you can enable or disable plugins via the Settings -> Configure KTorrent -> Plugins menu.

Integrated browser

Plugins

KTorrent will allow to download only certain files from a torrent, set bandwidth limits, it has system tray integration, it provides notifications, customisable keyboard shortcuts just like any respectable KDE application, and it also includes a configurable queue manager.

Just like Deluge, it offers a pretty easy-to-use interface and will display by default information about the torrents which are downloaded at the bottom, in several tabs. It shows the status, the torrent files, peers, chunks and even trackers.

You can also create new torrents and eventually share using trackers which don't require registration, like http://open.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce or http://denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969/announce.

Creating a new torrent

As a conclusion, I find KTorrent to be one of the most powerful clients for the BitTorrent protocol available for Linux, and definitely the best for KDE users. It gets new features and improvements with every release and it also supports trackerless torrents.

Review: Deluge 1.1.6 - Powerful BitTorrent Client for GNOME

Written in GTK, Deluge is a powerful BitTorrent client which, in my opinion, is the GNOME counterpart to KTorrent, the most popular client in KDE. The version I will review in this article is the latest at the time of writing, 1.1.6, released on April 6, 2009.

Deluge 1.1.6

Deluge has a clean, easy to use interface which may be familiar for those who used KTorrent. At the bottom Deluge will display in several tabs plenty of information regarding the active torrents:
- the status of the download (download speed, upload speed, share ratio, seeders, peers, ETA etc.)
- details like the name, hash, number of files or total size of the torrent
- the files included in the torrent
- peers IPs, client version and speeds
- the last tab, Options, will allow to set individual settings for each torrent you are downloading, including bandwidth and sharing settings or the location where the torrent will be saved

Starting a new download

Deluge allows to pause and resume downloading and it also integrates a queue manager for prioritising torrent downloads. You can sort torrents by name, size, progress percentage, seeders, peers, download and upload speed, ETA, share ratio, date added and tracker. You can also show or hide each of those columns in the View -> Columns menu option.

Deluge also allows you to create torrents and start seeding them very easy. Just go to File -> Create Torrent, add the files or folders you want to include into your torrent, fill in the Author and Comments fields and then add a few trackers. Next you can start seeding your torrent on popular torrent websites.

Creating torrents with Deluge 1.1.6

Although it has support for plugins, I could only find two available plugins on the official website, aside from the two included by default, Blocklist (to download and import IP blocklists) and Label (to offer filters on the state, tracker and keyword of the torrent).

It is highly configurable via the Edit -> Preferences dialogue, allowing to set upload/download speed limits, choose download locations, system tray integration (including the ability to start it in tray, without displaying the main window), and torrent complete notification (even by email). It also provides a Classic Mode in the Interface tab (which is enabled by default).

Preferences

One feature I missed in Deluge was a Search plugin, to search popular torrent sites directly from within Deluge instead of using a separate web browser. It would be nice to have such a feature in Deluge, as a plugin if not possible otherwise.

Overall, Deluge is definitely a very good choice, especially if you are a GNOME user. It is powerful, it has a simple and intuitive interface and comes with all the configuration options needed to customise and use it the way you want.