::A Geek in Korea::

Way back in the day, when torrents were brand spanking new and exciting, I used “The Shad0w experimental Bittorrent client”, which eventually evolved into Bittornado. Shad0w’s torrent program handled one file at a time, crashed a fair bit, and wasn’t all that great.

When more “advanced” clients were available, I picked up the habit of using the RAM-sucking, CPU intensive Azureus. This was only acceptable because the alternatives were lacking in some feature or another. As a whole, Azureus never made me happy, but using something else would mean I was missing out some something I thought I had come to need in a client.

A when a less resource intensive program finally had all the features I needed, I dropped Azureus like the bad habit it was. While I used Windows XP, uTorrent ruled the roost. The first version I used didn’t even come with an installer. It was just a file that was crazy small.

Moving to Linux, I was presented with some new choices, and some old faces once again. The basic Ubuntu bittorent client installed when you boot up is simplistic to the extreme. It was like using the same “one torrent at a time” model from back when the Bittorrent protocol was still new. I don’t hate myself that much.

Looking for alternatives in Synaptic, I found Azureus was available. Hell no. There was also a program called “Deluge” that was in early beta release, and Ktorrent. I decided to check out Ktorrent because it seemed the closest replacement to uTorrent at the time of my switch. The GUI was very familiar.

Any program with a capital “K” in it is probably part of the “KDE” desktop environment. I tend to run GNOME. This isn’t a reconcilable problem. KDE applications like Ktorrent run in GNOME, but they have to load up the non-native “widgets” to draw on the screen to make the menus. In essence, I’m running GNOME, and to draw Ktorrent, I have to load some parts of the KDE desktop too. This means that Ktorrent would take up more resources than a program made to run natively in Gnome. It’s nothing serious. It’s just a minor annoyance that means a few extra seconds when launching a program.

Someone in a thread about Bittorrent clients recommended checking out Deluge. One of the points of interest was that it was built with a PyGTK interface, (GTK+= GNOME Tool Kit) meaning it would run much better with GNOME . Since it wouldn’t have to load a second set of widgets, it would be “native” and faster. Going down the list of features added since the last updates when I passed it by, it had all the features I needed too. Faster, with more features? Sure, I’ll give it a try.

I’ve been very surprised by Deluge’s performance. The plugin system is new, but it still worked better than every single Azureus plugin I ever tried to use. Even Ktorrent’s plugins were a pain to work with compared to Deluge. I’m not running empirical tests to check, but the interface and torrents respond more quickly than Ktorrent in GNOME. The speeds I’ve been getting have also increased, but that might be because they are from another source, and might not have anything to do with the client at all.

I’ve been completely won over by Deluge, and I’m using it as my dedicated Bittorrent client. It’s better than the alternatives in Linux, and it’s better than what I’ve used in Windows too. Give it a shot if you need to download some big files from time to time.