So a bunch of people in this subreddit told me that uTorrent was trash and to switch to QBitTorrent.

I didn’t think much of it. How could one be so much better than the other? They’re both just torrent downloaders.

Holy shit was I wrong. I don’t even really understand what is happening, but downloading torrents on QBitTorrent is so, so, so much faster and I don’t even understand how.

A movie downloads in basically seconds compared to 10 or 20 minutes on uTorrent.

Why is this? What is this magic? What makes QBitTorrent so much faster?

  • rtxn@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    uTorrent has been down the shitter for over a decade now, I wouldn’t be surprised if the download speed was throttled without a pro subscription. It could also be a difference in how the applications discover seeds, or how much CPU time or memory is allocated to downloads.

    As a general rule, if an application is full of anti-features, it tends to have better, usually FOSS, alternatives.

  • ram@bookwormstory.social
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    6 months ago

    uTorrent doesn’t play well in the landscape of the modern bittorrent protocol. It’s also adware, infringes upon your privacy, and is a malware risk.

    qBittorrent is my client of choice, but other popular and great clients are Deluge (only up to ~500 torrents), transmission, and rtorrent (on Linux). There’s other clients as well but YMMV, especially if you do any private tracker usage.

      • ram@bookwormstory.social
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        6 months ago

        Ya, my only issue with Deluge is after ~500 torrents it starts to slow. I’m on private trackers, so I always tend to have ~2,000 torrents seeding at once. For my particular usecase, it simply becomes too slow and bogged down to be viable.

        Granted, I’ve not used Deluge in some 2 or 3 years; maybe they improved process handling since then? I’d love to be corrected if so.

  • CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    I don’t know if uTorrent does ratelimit torrents someway (they shouldn’t be by theory), but it being adware is enough of a result to switch to another torrent client.

    I’m more of a fan of Deluge, but alternatives like qBittorrent / Transmission are solid choices.

    • SterbenDeathGun@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      Trasmission never worked well for me, on the other hand qBittorrent did the job perfectly.

  • Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 months ago

    I’m assuming you mean you were using one of the older, “safe” versions of uTorrent. But yeah, the technology has updated. It’s better.

  • SterbenDeathGun@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    QBittorrent has been my torrent Client for 4/5 years at this point, never having problems. It works on my Steam Deck too (Arch).

  • DingoBilly@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    You were probably using the wrong version of utorrent.

    I think you need something like 1.6. No adware, no malware, just works fast and easy.

  • Untitled4774@sh.itjust.works
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    6 months ago

    There are a handful of features that I really like with qbittorrent but there were plugins I can’t find replacements for from Deluge:

    • having items deleted after meeting seeding requirements, as *arr auto imports, but having exceptions for private trackers
    • the above without having the *arr stack have a permanent warning
    • auto adding public default trackers to any public torrent

    I’ve switched back and forth a few times and I run them side by side but let deluge take the reins of most of it because I have it set up to be hands off with the above.

    If anyone knows how I can set up qbt the same way that would be great though

  • LocustOfControl@reddthat.com
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    6 months ago

    I do miss that really detailed block download page, but that’s only cos I’d watch it instead of doing something useful with my life.

  • MIDItheKID@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I switch from uTorrent to qBittorrent when Ninite dropped it. I wasn’t aware that uTorrent had become aware, and Ninite had my back. I trust those guys with the selection of softwares they offer.