Best Torrent Clients You Can Use on Linux Desktop

Are you looking for a reliable torrent client? We’ve compiled a list of some of the best free torrent clients that you can use on Linux.

Large files are difficult to download from the Internet, especially while directly capturing them from a host server. It is hard to imagine a proper way of downloading giant files from the Internet without a torrent client.

It is software for downloading files that utilize a P2P (peer-to-peer) system. But before we get started, we’d like to tell you a few essential things.

First, having a torrent client on your PC or laptop is legal. No one can accuse you of pirating just because you have installed a torrent client. However, if you’re using it to download or upload copyrighted content, you can get in trouble with the authorities or your Internet provider.

In the current article, we will go over our best free torrent clients you can use to download and upload torrent files.

1. Transmission Torrent Client

Transmission GTK Torrent Client

Transmission is free and open-source software licensed under GPL. It was initially out on Linux and macOS before making its way to Windows. Above all, Transmission is one of the fastest and most lightweight GUI-based clients available for Linux.

One of its most significant advantages is that Transmission comes with a visually appealing and easy-to-use interface. It is excellent for getting things done without looking too much under the hood.

Transmission still has advanced options, and they’re just tucked away from sight. It is currently the default BitTorrent client for the GNOME desktop environment, and many of you might be using it for downloading torrent and magnet files.

Transmission is easy to use and has all the primary torrent client features you might need, like encryption, peer exchange, magnet links, speed limits, etc.

2. Deluge Torrent Client

Deluge Torrent Client

Deluge is a free, open-source, and cross-platform BitTorrent client. It aims to be a lightweight, secure, and feature-rich client. It has all the basic features that a torrent client should have, such as torrent queueing, prioritization torrents, protocol encryption, proxy support, web seeds, and bandwidth control.

Its minimalist user interface allows fast performance across all platforms the software can run on, including most Linux distributions, macOS, and Windows.

Deluge is written in Python and uses libtorrent at its core and GTK for the main user interface. As a result, it’s lean and relatively bare-bones with its base installation, perfect if that’s all you need.

Many P2P users are concerned about keeping their activity private. Deluge provides users with an enhanced encryption option. It employs reliable encryption techniques such as Message Stream Encryption and Protocol Encryption.

One of its biggest strengths is that Deluge can be customized to a great extent with the help of different plugins. It uses a plugin system for many of its features, allowing you to build your torrent client from the ground up.

As a result, Deluge can be tricky for beginners to find their way around. Still, if you’re willing to put in 20-30 minutes and overlook the minimalist interface, you’ll likely find that Deluge has much more than you initially anticipated.

3. qBittorent Client

qBittorrent Torrent Client

qBittorrent is a lightweight, free, and-open source BitTorrent client. It is not as fully featured as heavyweight clients such as Vuze, but it has almost every feature most torrent users are ever likely to want.

One of its most standout features is the ability to configure and attach qBittorrent to any VPN interface. This is important, especially to users who are worried about exposing their IP address over the internet while torrenting. In addition, you can search for torrents directly from within the qBittorrent client by installing search engine plugins.

The private torrents feature allows you to share files only among selected friends, while BitTorrent protocol encryption attempts to make traffic harder to identify by ISPs.

You can control and manage your qBittorrent downloads remotely via a web interface. It looks very similar to that of the software client and allows you to do everything you can in the client.

qBittorrent supports sequential downloading that allows users to download torrent pieces in sequential order. This is an excellent feature because it will enable you to start watching a video file while it is still downloading.

qBittorrent includes all the basic torrenting features we’d expect a good client to have, including support for magnet links, automatic port forwarding, and scheduled speed limits.

On top of that, qBittorrent comes with RSS feeds for automatic downloads and a web UI for viewing your downloads from other machines.

So for most people, qBittorrent should fit the bill nicely.

4. BiglyBT Client

BiglyBT

BiglyBT is a feature-filled open-source BitTorrent client written in the Java language, and it comes with many features.

It is the first client to offer the possibility of using the BitTorrent V2 protocol. BiglyBT is the continuation of the Vuze/Azureus open source project and is actively developed by the original coders. The client is currently available on all major desktop platforms, including Linux, Windows, and macOS.

There are many extensive features of the BiglyBT. For example, BiglyBT detects similar files in multiple torrents and merges swarms to download files faster and fix incomplete torrents.

In addition, it comes with a feature called Swarm Merging that manages to speed up the torrents that don’t have available bits. BiglyBT also lets users download files from a specific country or network or ISP and schedule the download by the time of day.

Furthermore, it detects VPNs, provides support for I2P to enable anonymous download of files, and can proxy search results and internal browser connections through Tor.

BiglyBT includes a media player with UPnP Media Server and DLNA support, supporting media conversion. Moreover, you can control this torrent client remotely through its Android app.

BiglyBt will satisfy users who seek a free torrent client with advanced features. It comes with all the same qualities present in the best torrent clients.

5. Tixati Torrent Client

Tixati

Tixati is a well-designed client for torrent transfers. It is available for Linux and Windows, easy to use, but with enough advanced options to make it an exciting application for advanced users.

The client is also relatively fast and supported with a unique download algorithm that will make your download faster than ever.

Compared to other torrent clients, Tixati might look strange to you due to its retro design. It doesn’t follow the traditional torrent software interface. However, do not let that mislead you.

Tixati has all the basic features of a torrent client, including file prioritization and sequential download and magnet links, DHT, and PEX support. In addition, it provides more configuration options than many other clients, making it very customizable.

The main feature is that Tixati will show you all the data and information about the files in graphs, which is not offered by any other software. Also included are powerful bandwidth charting, throttling capabilities, and a full DHT implementation.

As a result, Tixati is one of the most advanced and flexible BitTorrent clients available.

Tixati fully supports RSS. RSS support allows you to automatically download any torrent files you have set up in an RSS feed. Every time the feed updates with new files, Tixati will instantly download them with no manual input from you.

Tixati works best as a simple, free-to-use tool that can be installed easily on your Linux system for superfast torrent downloading.

Bottom Line

Torrents are beneficial platforms to download large files from the Internet in a short time. However, finding the best torrent client isn’t easy, with so many options.

So these are our best torrent clients you should try, and all of them work well on Linux. Please, don’t forget to tell us about your favorite one in the comments section of this article.

Bobby Borisov

Bobby Borisov

Bobby, an editor-in-chief at Linuxiac, is a Linux professional with over 20 years of experience. With a strong focus on Linux and open-source software, he has worked as a Senior Linux System Administrator, Software Developer, and DevOps Engineer for small and large multinational companies.

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8 Comments

  1. Great article and review (perhaps aria2 should also have been included) but never forget the all time warning —

    ‘When you pirate files, you are downloading Communism.”

  2. You mention that qBitTorrent has a web interface but omitted that Transmission and Deluge and Tixati also have a web interface. There are even different themes which have been created for the Transmission web interface.

  3. I have found with my experience torrenting, that VUZE is more suited to windows OS platforms, there are many problems (at times), VUZE crashes in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS due to java scrips, HTML code errors, plugin errors and possibly more, Now, BiglyBT is VUZE, it is just an updated ver.
    “TRANSMISSION” there is no “Seed for Ever” option as seeding is the most important part of torrenting, otherwise the walls cave-in if one does not seed back. & IP possibly blacklisted on that site you have downloaded from.
    You Need to Seed Folks.
    “Deluge” has awful NAT problems that just cannot seem to resolve.
    One sometimes gets lucky from time to time using defalt setting and can send & receive in & outbound packets with success.
    But, it is all trial & error…..

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