This article will cover various free and open source Torrent clients available for Linux. The torrents clients featured below have nearly identical feature sets. These features include support for magnet links, bandwidth control tools, tracker editing, encryption support, scheduled downloading, directory watching, webseed downloads, peer management, port forwarding and proxy management. Unique features of individual torrents clients are stated in their respective headings below.
Transmission and Transmission-cli
Transmission is the default torrent client shipped in Ubuntu and many other GNOME based Linux distributions. It features a clean, minimal, clutter free user interface and you won’t see a sidebar or large toolbar in Transmission. By default, users are exposed to only a handful of UI elements. However, its behavior can be customized and it includes a plethora of options that you would expect from any typical torrent client. In addition to the GUI app, it also features a command line tool for downloading and managing torrents and a web interface facilitating remote access.
To install Transmission in Ubuntu, run the command below:
$ sudo apt install transmission-gtk
To install transmission command line app in Ubuntu, run the command below:
$ sudo apt install transmission-cli
To know more about command line usage, run the following command:
$ transmission-cli –help
Installation instructions for other Linux distributions are available here.
Deluge
Deluge is a free, open source and cross-platform torrent client for Linux, macOS and Windows. Its user interface is a little more verbose than Transmission, but has a similar feature set, a command line interface and a Web UI. It also features a plugin system whereby users can further extend its functionality and use advanced functionality not available in Transmission.
To install deluge in Ubuntu, run the command below:
$ sudo apt install deluge
To install the command line version, run the command below:
$ sudo apt install deluge-console
To know more about command line usage, run the following command:
You can download packages for other Linux distributions from here.
qBittorrent
qBittorrent is another popular free and open source GUI torrent client built upon Qt libraries. In comparison with Transmission and Deluge, qBittorrent provides some additional features like support for RSS feeds and an integrated search engine for finding torrents over the web. You will also find the UI familiar if you have used µTorrent on Windows.
To install qBittorrent in Ubuntu, run the command below:
$ sudo apt install qbittorrent
Installation instructions for other Linux distributions are available here.
uGet
uGet is a full featured download manager that can use multi-threaded connections to speed up file downloading. It also supports torrents, giving you a full software suite for downloading all types of files. The options for managing torrents are not as advanced as other dedicated torrent clients but it gets the job done.
To download uGet in Ubuntu, run the command below:
Packages for other Linux distributions are available here.
Note that in order to download torrents from uGet, “aria2” plugin must be enabled in uGet, as shown in the screenshot below:
Aria2c
Aria2 or Aria2c is a command line tool for downloading files from a number of different protocols. One of the uGet plugins uses aria2 as base for managing and downloading torrents. To download aria2 in Ubuntu, run the command below:
Aria2 is available in repositories of most Linux distributions and you can install it from package manager by searching for the term “aria2”.
To download files from a “.torrent” file, run the command below:
If it is a magnet link, run the command below:
$ aria2c <magnet_link_uri>
To view details about all aria2 command line options, run the command below:
Conclusion
These torrent clients cover most of the functionality that you will expect from a typical torrent client. There are a few more torrent clients for Linux, but they are not covered in this article as they do not bring anything new to table and their development has stagnated.