It was a little rough getting there, but KDE 4 has reached a point where I’m using it on all my machines. The pain was worth it (barely) and KDE is by far the most satisfying desktop environment for my personal use.
That being said, I was running into quite a few strange problems with KTorrent, the default bittorrent client. The number one problem was the vast majority of new torrents I added would have a status of “stalled” and rarely change to a normal downloading situation. This is apparently a known bug in KTorrent. I didn’t always experience this problem – KTorrent worked fine for several months - but once it started happening it seemed to “stick”, and made KTorrent virtually unusable for me.
So, after trying (but failing) to resolve the bug, I set out to find an alternative!
In the past, under XFCE, I really liked Deluge. A very solid and feature-rich client with a responsive dev team. However, this time I wanted to find a QT based client.
After a bit of searching, I ran across qBittorrent. Here are the things that were important to me that qBittorrent delivered on:
- Free Software
- QT-based
- Optional Web Interface for torrent control
- Optional Minimize to tray
- Stop/Start All Torrents easily
- Under active development
After using qBittorrent for several weeks now, I can only find one thing to complain about: You can’t seem to view/preview individual files in a torrent. One of things I often want to do is to look at a file in a torrent that is complete, even though the entire torrent is not complete.
Some clients make this very easy, and you can view (or even prioritize) files inside a torrent. I can’t find that functionality in qBittorrent.
This is a fairly serious shortcoming – not severe enough to reject qBittorrent over – but it is certainly something I would like to see added and certainly something I miss.
One thing that I don’t miss, but others might: the queue controls are not as fine-grained as in some clients. Personally, even though I would consider myself a fairly heavy torrent user, I’ve never really found such detailed control necessary. I felt like I should mention it though, because someone out there might like setting up scheduled queues or the like.
Special kudos go to the web interface which is very clean and responsive and is the best such interface I have dealt with.
If you are in the market for a new bittorrent client, especially once based in QT – I highly recommend giving qBittorrent a look. It’s a solid and reliable client with well implemented features and under active development so chances are good it will continue to improve!
#1 by Newbuntu User on March 26, 2010 - 4:26 am
I just installed Ubuntu on a separate machine, and I’m loving it so far! After figuring out how to play .avi files, .mp3 files, etc., I’m very seriously considering putting it on my main machine in place of Windows 7.
I downloaded qBittorrent before I knew the default bittorrent client with Ubuntu 9.10: “Transmission”, so I can’t really compare the two, but I love qBittorrent so far. I use uTorrent on Windows, and transitioning to qBittorrent on this machine was quite smooth. I actually get faster speed on the same exact torrent on qBittorrent than I do on uTorrent; that’s just an observation.
Personally, I love being able to queue up with a Maximum priority as well as High; it’s actually one of the things I wish uTorrent had.
Anyway, good review!
#2 by Jason on March 26, 2010 - 9:42 am
Newbuntu User,
Thanks for the comments!
I’m glad you are finding Ubuntu a good match for you – I remember the mix of worry and excitment when I decided to leave Windows behind!
If you really like uTorrent and are going to stick with GNOME, you might want to check out Deluge. It is a very nice GTK-based client that is quite similar to uTorrent and has a responsive development team behind it. It’s what I used when I used GNOME, and I was quite happy with it!