Recommendations for torrenting with linux?
Recommendations for torrenting with linux?
I have a router I'm running nord vpn but I use bitTorrent on windows and I'm looking to switch. Does anyone have a flavor of Linux and program they use?
Any advice would be helpful I'm getting nowhere on forums.
qbittorrent.
This; Linuxserver Qbittorrent docker with gluetun to make sure all traffic goes through your VPN.
I don't use docker, so I just set the interface to the tun0 or whatever in the qbittorrent config.
rtorrent for me.
KTorrent (KDE) or Transmission (GNOME).
GNOME is the default on Ubuntu, Fedora and lots more. KDE is default on OpenSUSE, KDE Neon and Kubuntu.
I use qBitorrent with no VPN because my ISP don't give a fuck of what I'm doing with their data
Where do you live?
SE Asia
Mullvad + Transmission
Just use qbittorrent
I use i2p for torrents exclusively. It's slow but totally private so I can seed without needing to mess about with a VPN.
There is a slightly smaller community but the people on there have similar tastes to me: linux textbooks, GOG games, jazz albums, etc.
I torrent a lot on Linux and use Qbittorrent. Surfshark has a great VPN on Linux.
If you want to get into it then Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr and nzb360 ($10) with Jellyfin is a great stack to manage your library but needs a bit of work to set up. You can then use the phone to download and search and watch it with an android TV app.
I had some issues setting it up with a ublue fedora immutable distro which are pretty non-existent on most standard distros.
Surfshark
Please don't use Surfshark
What's wrong with Surfshark?
Qbittorrent: you can bind the application with a network interface and ensure all the connexion will use your vpn.
bonus: you can use it as a server (without any graphical interface) and manage the torrent with your browser. This way, you can create a torrentbox on a dedicated computer.
Yes, this is what I do, with Private Internet Access (VPN). You can bind qbittorrent to PIA's interface, and also to its forwarding port.
Yeah, I just wish there was a way to automatically update the port whenever it changes. It doesn’t change often since my server tends to stay on 24/7. But when it does change, it would be nice to have it automatically update.
Back before my current server, I was just messing around with it in Windows. I discovered that qBit actually stores the forwarded port in the registry, and PIA has a terminal command that can print the currently forwarded port. I tried to write a quick .bat script to automatically run when the PIA network adapter connected. The goal was to grab the port number and update the registry for qBit any time the internet went out or my server was rebooted.
And it seemed to work fine. It launched when PIA connected, and pushed the new value to the registry. But that forwarded port was also apparently being stored somewhere else as well, because just updating the registry wasn’t enough; When qBit launched it still showed the old port number, even though all of the documentation I found said it was simply a registry value. At that point I just gave up and manually updated it every time I turned my computer on.
This is what I use. Once you get it working, it's a great setup. I have it running on my mini HTPC under the hood, and it really doesn't use much in the way of resources.
It has a webui that I can use to search and add torrents, and you can choose an alternate UI for the page if you want (I used VueTorrent, it looks better on mobile).
And, like others have said, you can bind it so that if your VPN disconnects, torrents won't just keep running in the background.
Second VueTorrent. Makes for an absolutely blissful experience managing torrents and with qbittorrent's built in search plugins you early have to go to the sites anymore
I use qbittorent through Mullvad using Gluetun as qbt is running in docker.
DHT and PEX don't seem to work though, I did brief research and it seemed related to mullvad no longer allowing port forwarding? I don't know enough about how it works but I tried messing with it for several hours a couple days ago to no avail, only trackers appear to work for connecting to other peers.
On a headless Ubuntu LXC running in proxmox, I just access the qbt interface via its Web portal.
Mullvad all the way
I use BiglyBt on Debian. I use BiglyBt because I previously used Vuze, and I used Vuze because I previously used Azureus. I don't really remember why I went with Azureus originally, but it may have just been because it was popular at that time.
I get the impression most people use other bittorrent clients nowadays, but BiglyBt does what I need it to do. I never really used any of the "advanced" features of Vuze myself, pretty much only using it for torrents.
qBittorrent
I think it is even heavily used on Windows.
Generally most people get recommended to start their Linux journey with Mint as it is noob friendly (while still having full functionality) other options to consider would be popOS Ubuntu & Fedora.
qBittorrent is the most recommended I've seen, although I use transmission.
Why do you use transmission? Genuinely curious. The times I tried to use it, it seemed so basic and lacking functionality
It works ? I mean what necessary functionality is it missing ? Magnet link goes in, files come out, happy face.
For me, I like that it isn't overcomplicated and just works. It being basic is a big pro to me.
qbittorrent + mullvadvpn
(on debian 12)
Why Debian 12 specifically?
I highly recommend Tixati. Its free and very powerful. Edit to say i use Debian!
qbittorrent
Did qbittorrent have memory leaks for anyone else? From time to time I'm forced to kill it because it's make my pc unusable. Still my torrent client of choose, but I would like to know if this is something someone else experienced.
Never experienced this.
When I had memory leaks with software, the fault was usually old OS.
ive not experienced that in the almost 10 years of using it on multiple debian based distros
Transmission
This with remote transmission on your phone to control it
Honestly, whatever floats your boat. There are many good options here, just try all and use the one you liked most. Or just go and pick one, or use the one that comes pre-installed in your distro.
Recommended ones:
- qbittorrent (my favourite as for many other in the comments)
- Transmission
- Deluge
- rtorrent (great if you run a headless server)
+1 to rtorrent
Transmission. Simple, fast, efficient.
Anybody got a nix config for binding qbittorrent to mullvad easily?
There are 2 methods:
First method is to open preferences in qbit, under Advanced > Network interface, select "wg0-mullvad" from the drop-down menu. The interface might be named something different for you, but it should stand out as pretty obvious which one to select.
Other method is in qbit > Preferences > Connection, under "Proxy Server" select "SOCKS5" from the drop-down, input 10.64.0.1 as the host and 1080 as the port.
You could even do both these options at the same time if you like, there is absolutely no downside. It's like wearing 2 condoms except it feels the same as wearing nothing at all.
It’s like wearing 2 condoms except it feels the same as wearing nothing at all.
...I mean......
Ah, so, I should've been more clear, I have annoying requirements, I want qbittorrent to run through mullvad exclusively, and i want them to be intertwined and startup with eachother automatically. I don't want any of my other apps to be running in mullvad, is there a good way to do that? I think the socks5 proxy requires me to have it open and running, and thus everything would run through it, but maybe that wireguard method works around that? not sure, just wondering
Asus WRT Router > Proton VPN
^
ProxMox EV
^
Debian 12 Headless VM
^
Docker Compose
^
Docker Engine
- Unbound
- Pihole
- Prowlarr (for indexers)
- Radarr
- Sonarr
- Lidarr
- Readarr
- 4 Instances of QBit for each ‘Arr
- Jellyfin
- Jellyseerr
- Traefik for SSL/TLS
- Homepage
Kind of a crude & simplified way of putting my setup but I think it gets the point across.
Just out of curiosity, why bother running 4 instances of qBit for the various *arrs? Why not just use automatic torrent management, and have the different categories download to different folders? My *arrs are all using a single instance of qBit, and each service simply uses a different category with a different download path.
The benefit is that I can see my total up/down speeds, ratios, etc very easily without needing to change to an entirely different instance. I can filter by category, or see everything at the same time.
Just out of curiosity, why bother running 4 instances of qBit for the various *arrs? Why not just use automatic torrent management, and have the different categories download to different folders? My *arrs are all using a single instance of qBit, and each service simply uses a different category with a different download path.
I started to become frustrated with the queue on a single qbit instance, I would set the max total of active torrents to 15; 10 active downloads and 5 seeding and it starts out fine but eventually those 10 active downloads all became stalled.
The amount of times I have had to open qbit to just move stuff down the queue so other things could download was obnoxious so I made 3 other instances for each *arr and it’s felt easier to manage.
Proton VPN claims to offer Port-Forwarding for their Wireguard router configs however, when I attempt to do it they don’t display the active port anywhere on their website.
+1 for the WRT router, if you can get a decent device with an enough powerful CPU it can host Transmission
Asus WRT Routers are great however, it doesn’t support certain Registrars for DDNS like Cloudflare so I had to install Merlin Firmware, ssh into the router and then manually configure a cron-job so that my A records stay up to date with my WAN.
https://github.com/clayauld/asus-merlin-cloudflare-ddns
Thankfully somebody already been down this path a posted the documentation which made things 100x easier.
I would also look in to I2P. Their are a few clients that support it like qbittorrent.
You can torrent easily on Linux using any distro and any client.
It's very unlikely you'll have any issues.
If you need a daemon (to always run in the background, like on a server), use Deluge or Transmission.
If you just need a basic client that can live in your systray, qBittorrent.
Deluge is another good client -- I'm not sure why but its defaults gave me much better download speeds than transmission or qbittorrent
qBittorrent! You can even add a search plugin directly in the client.
Was using Deluge before on Windows and for a while when I switched to Linux but started having issues with it.
You can even add a search plugin directly in the client.
Huh. Well, that'll make things easier.
rtorrent, you just need an ssh connection if wanting to know remotely what's going on
I personally like "fragments", it's quite a simple app though but it works great for me. Not sure if it works great with non-gnome setups though, since it's a gtk app
As far as flavors of Linux, I would honestly recommend using VirtualBox while on Windows. You can download a preconfigured VM of just about any Linux distro or download whatever iso you want and install in a VM. This gives you some freedom to play around and break things (and you probably will at least once) and get more familiar with the different desktop environments, software installation, command line, searching for how to do things etc.