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!