uTorrent has been compromised for years. I like Transmission for its simplicity.
Yeah nearly 20 years I think. It’s not open either. If you can’t figure this out god help you rawdogging the internet with torrents.
100%. I stopped using them a very long time ago after they changed their UI to what it is now. I realized then it was compromised because the UI no longer served a useful purpose and instead prioritized visuals and engagement.
It’s interesting how a UI overhaul can be a red flag. Recently for me it was Bitwarden’s overhaul a little while back with all the cute emoji like graphics and rounded corners and stuff
Proton vpn is next on my chopping block.
Nice, I’ve been looking over alternatives for exactly that myself. Let me know if you find a good one. This world sure is in a state
I run Deluge for the same reason. AutoRemovePlus plugin and a couple others go a long way and just like Transmission it has a web-ui for remote management, so I can VPN back to my home network and manage deluge from my phone’s browser.
Switched from Transmission to web-qBittorrent. Easy switch woth docker and Ive been happier. For transparency I rarely use it, though.
You can also run qBittorrent in a docker container behind an always on VPN. Very nice for those with a little arr in their lives. 🏴☠️
Yes qbittorrent and gluetun in a docker container is very handy.
It took me a while to figure out gluetun. Once it’s all setup and configured correctly, it’s great !
thank you for introducing me to gluetun, this comment made me search it up and what a cool project!
This was the setup I had recently, but recent versions of gluetun just couldn’t maintain a connection. I tried with three different VPN providers and they all dropped connection within 12 hours.
I’ve heard some people have that issue, check out binhex’s qbit container with built-in VPN handling.
For maximum privacy, I have qBittorrent on an air gapped system. Good luck catching me FBI!
/s
I took the above setup one step further and never plugged in the power!
It’s stacked, even.
I’ve been using a split tunnel to make sure qbit stays behind the VPN, but I like this idea too, feels like there’s some redundancy.
I actually run two instances of gluetun running two VPN seats configured for two different countries and a script that speed tests both every hour and switches what network is piped into qbit based on how fast the speed test was with some logic for if I am uploading more or downloading more on the client. Quite proud of it tbh.
1000% this. Get on a private tracker and setup your glutun/qbit docker container and you never have to worry about your ratios or bring had by the feds. It’s so nice. My jellyfin setup with Seerr gets a lot of traffic from my whole family. All of it is running on second hand hardware from office e-waste auctions that I’ve spent maybe $250 on over the last 4-5 years. Way cheaper than paying for all the subscription streamers. And I got to learn a fuckload of cool stuff I never would have otherwise.
you can also manually tell it which network to use and select the vpn so if the vpn stops working it loses internet rather than continuing to run unprotected.
I think a lot of nontechnical people or computer newbies have an assumption in their head that if you want free shit, you’ll have to pay in other ways, like with advertising or tracking. It’s just the way of the world that nothing is free. There’s no free lunch. If a bittorrent client that you use to get free movies has ads, there must be no better options. We’re bombarded with this idea constantly. Television, radio, streaming, social media. You get it for free but pay with your attention to ads. We’ve all been this person at some point.
Then you discover that there are other options, that there are groups of passionate nerds dedicating half of their lives to making useful stuff, distributing it to the world, and expecting nothing in return. This can’t be real, right? What’s the catch? I thought making software was so hard and boring that nobody would do it in exchange for nothing. But it’s real. All this time you’ve been using crap software that nags you to try their other product, promotes products which have no earthly use, secretly captures information you expect to remain private, but there was this amazing thing outside the castle walls which does none of that. How did I not know about this before? Who are these altruistic people? I want to meet them.
Then you dig in more and find out about the free software movement. Some old hippie at MIT was mad he couldn’t get his printer working because the manufacturer refused to supply the source code. He saw software being closed up and becoming industrial rather than academic, transitioning to making a profit, and couldn’t bear it. Then we got linux, and all the systems around it, and all the distros, and there was once IBM who created the open PC standard, the copyleft/permissive division over licenses, and so on. Somewhere in the world, there is a 14-year-old learning about all this for the first time just as we did, and maybe it’s all a little different because of AI and smartphones and that Stallman is more well-known to be sort of a creep, but it’s still part of the history for how we got to where we are today.
It dawns on you that uTorrent is a trick and qBittorrent is the genuine, real deal. They’re both “free” but one of them is more free than the other. One claims to be free, but was only created to make somebody passive income for eternity. The other is a bittorent client, a devoted implementation of a specification for an open protocol (the most basic of which is only a few pages long). Bittorrent is simple, fundamental infrastructure and there’s absolutely no reason a client needs to show you ads or siphon away your data.
First, I want to express my appreciation for the post. It’s well written and thought provoking. Thank you for taking the time to write it.
I was the person you described in the first paragraph until the last few years, starting with my first Linux distro. It was the doorway into a world of amazingly functional yet free software.
I’m still gratefully surprised on a regular basis at the sheer amount and scope of FOSS. I spent the evening rooting my LG TV, the one product I most grudgingly enjoyed (fuck LG’s surveillance) and not only was I able to disable said surveillance, but tweaking some settings and installing a few homebrewed applications has made my TV so much better. Even the Plex application, PlxNative, is leagues better than stock.
Now I look like some sort of tech wizard to my family, but all of this is truly due to the contributions of the very community you describe - I’m just a monkey that can read a guide and push buttons. The real fucking wizards here are those contributing to these projects.
After degoogling I noticed that FOSS usually comes with less convenience and maturity, so you choose either your data or you loose the bells and whistles.
Depends on where in the curve the enshittification of the competition has become. Windows 11 seems like convenience and maturity, until you realize that desktop Linux has been a far more functional product for years, and it doesn’t what you take, take, take from you every chance it can get.
Photoshop seems like convenience and maturity, until you realize you have options that don’t want to charge you hundreds of dollars a month.
Hell, after using both Adobe Premiere and DaVinci Resolve, I just flat out prefer the latter. And the improvements Blackmagic has put out for the last few major releases prove that they will continue to improve their software. Granted, Resolve isn’t exactly FOSS, but it is free, and I can at least respect them way way more than Adobe’s shitty business models.
It’s been malware for at least a decade, I think. It was good when it was first released but quickly went downhill.
i’m pretty sure version 2.2.1 was the last version before the corporate takeover and malware was baked in
Just remember that without a vpn, any torrent client is still basically broadcasting your ip and what you are downloading
Is there a sexual deviant in your house? Find out now!
You mean, like another one?
Funny way to get to know your neighbors (cg-nat and all of that)
Yea babe, it’s called cgnat. That is why our neighbours filthy downloads look like it’s coming from our house.
Yes, there is. I’m it.
This has been the case for at least like 15 years. Baffles me that people still don’t get the memo
Yeah, as soon as ads started popping up I knew shit was going downhill.
I’m glad qbit has held the line so far, but I’m always spooked to download the newest update for fear that it may be the one that introduced AI or some other bloat.
even if they did, there are a million other options that are just as good.
Not really, qBittorrent has the best feature set
Linux+Transmission master race represent
I remember when I replaced Azureus with utorrent. It was amazing - azureus killed my computer and utorrent in its entirety was around 2MB and could handle all the torrents I threw at it. That and azureus/vuze started bundling adware!
I’d moved off to headless torrent clients by the time I read about utorrent bundling malware but I think it goes back to 2011.
Malware bundling was a risk of unofficial sources for the uTorrent installer - real malware-ification began around 2014-16.
What about Deluge?
Deluge is awesome but it uses more resources than other alternatives. As another poster mentioned it also struggles with torrents with many files.
Was looking for this comment as I have been using deluge for a LONG time.
Man I remember pivoting from uTorrent to Deluge forever ago, then swapping from that to qbittorrent
What a blast from the past
Transmission gang checking in.
I use qbittorrent, but I respect Transmission
Holy shit. Utorrent is still around??
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
We had problems with qbittorrent on Linux where it was leaking our IPV6 addresses, we ended up switching to Transmission instead. At the time, it also seemed that qbittorrent is Windows first and that there wasn’t feature parity. Has that changed?
docker+VPN+transmission ftw.
How y’all feel about Tixati? I like it and think it’s great
Proprietary software for torrents?
Sorry I didn’t know, it has bad aspects that are proven? I’ll change if so
The fact that it’s proprietary is a deal breaker for me.
What about tixati ?
