I love Linux, I use it all the time, my windows partition is constantly being ntfsresize’d to make room for some new (and completely pointless) project. So please believe me when I say, I mean no offense to anyone who has worked on a project I might cite here, its just me venting a general frustration.
Why is it that uTorrent is such a great bittorrent client? Even under wine, it outstrips every other client I have found for download and upload speeds, but whats more, its still running in a smaller memory footprint! Now, I’m not someone who claims that every line of open source code is holy, and that if code is developed openly it is by nature incredible, its just aggravating how often I find myself turning to wine.
Now, for some things (aka the DirectX unit in my game design class 
) you just know your going to use something, be it Vmware, qemu, wine, or (god forbid) actually booting into windows. but Bittorrent is ours. Its an open creation through and through, its open source, an open standard, and an important element of the open source communities infrastructure. In fact, the distribution of Linux ISO’s is one of the few mainstream legal uses….. *sigh* I know its a pointless rant, but wouldn’t it stand to reason that the open source world would hold the key to the fastest, lightest, and most reliable bittorrent client?
I don’t want to sound like I’m attacking the open source clients, they’re solid, generally reliable, and never a major pain to use, but no one really offers what utorrent does.
Its a silly and pointless ramble, and I’m open to thoughts, questions, or ideas, so fire away
Oh, and one last thing, can I just give Wine some incredible, huge, and mad props for the past few months have been big, and the hardwork shows, many thanks.
Just a little fyi, I really like rtorrent (it’s ncurses-based but you can set it to monitor a folder for .torrents) and it’s at least as efficient as utorrent. It’s perfect for my needs at least.
Hmmm, its muuuuch lighter, which is very nice, still libtorrent, which means no PXE or more advanced features, but its cool to know its there.
I’m currently using utorrent under wine as a last ditch effort at reasonable BT performance. I used to use Bittornado with no issues on a business ADSL connection to my home (read: not packet filtered). A move and limits on available net providers suddenly changed my sunny BT basking disposition to gloomy BT desperation. The latest build of Bittornado supposedly has encryption built in, but gods help me if I get it to work properly if at all.
I tried rtorrent. I swear I did. In my experience rtorrent was just as bad. I’m not flaming you understand… I recall liking something about the interface and it’s ability to provide way, way, WAY, more information about currently running torrents. It just would not work for me. I wish it did. But it didn’t.
I miss being able to ssh in to my box from wherever, screen -rd, elinks http://my.favorite.torrent.site, download and manage my torrents and get out quicker than the MP/RIAA subpoenas your grandmother… … …
Hence, utorrent, wine, and a search for a secure remote control desktop program to replace the infamously insecure VNC, but that’s a whole other rant. Ultimately, a little ssh know-how couple with VNC and I’m in business.
That said, Some good ol’ utorrent encryption action added to Deluge if you must GUI, and to Bittornado and/or rtorrent, and we might have something good cooking.
Phew.
[...] Kevin, I know not how “light” you’re referring to (I’ve a personal policy against using any proprietary software where such comparably usable Free alternatives exist), but my favorite client is by far Transmission. It works well; it’s UI is nice and simple, and it seems to integrate well with the rest of my GNOME desktop. [...]
Have you checked out MonoTorrent?
http://www.monotorrent.com/
I haven’t, but I’ve been checking in on its development from time to time and it seems to be maturing very quickly.
Sounds very lightweight and hackable as well!
Why not azureus? Fast and highly customizable – though a little buggy if you don’t use Sun’s java VM.
Just to be clear, rtorrent’s libtorrent is not the same as the SourceForge libtorrent project. I don’t know what PXE is, but rtorrent supports encryption in the stable branch as of January or so.
Sorry, by PXE I meant PEX, which stands for Peer EXchange, it was started by azureus, but is also implemented by uTorrent, and is a means of sharing peers and seeds with other peers and vice versa.
For me, this is a real deal breaker, its a wonderful system and significantly decreases bootstrap time on new torrents, and dramatically increases the number of peers that we can find, especially if a tracker is slow or down.
[...] 26. March 2007 Hacking, Linux, Gnome, Ubuntu A follow up to my earlier post. [...]
AFAIK transmission (http://transmission.m0k.org) supports PEX. Overall it’s a great client, the only thing I’m missing about it is the lack of a queue in the GTK+ gui.