Transmission Becomes Default BitTorrent Client for Ubuntu - Adventures in Switching to Linux

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Transmission Becomes Default BitTorrent Client for Ubuntu

The popular cross-platform BitTorrent client Transmission, praised by its users for being full-featured but lightweight, is now officially the new default client for Ubuntu.

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Ubuntu is switching their default torrent application in 8.04 to Transmission. I don't know that I think that is the best torrent application to switch to but it is better than the boring default client that is in place now!

Back in Windows, my primary torrent application was Azureus. That was before it got so slow that I couldn't run it and much else on my system at the same time. Azureus does run on Linux though as it is written in Java using the SWT toolkit. After Azureus, I used uTorrent (micro torrent, that "u" is really a ยต). I really loved it. It was lightweight and fast. It also had lots of great features. There are too many other Linux clients to bother with it in wine though.

The problem with the current default torrent application in Ubuntu 7.10 is that it is bare bones. I really like lots of progress statistics like uTorrent provided. The replacement I found and like better is Deluge.
As you can see from the picture above, there are lots of details on what is going on and lots of bandwidth settings and the like. I really like that. It also tells you details about individual files and individual peers.
Transmission has a lot of those features too, only at a more basic level so it is preferable than the current default. I can also see the desire by Ubuntu to choose a slightly simpler default torrent applicaiton so I'm not going to complain. It isn't like I can't use Deluge like I am now in a few simple clicks!

And now some Transmission screen shots:

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