gnome-bittorrent is an unsatisfactory bittorrent client

[alex.v at comcast.net]

Gnome-bittorent may not have as many features as other clients, but it's small, 
functional, and easy to use. One of the nice things about Ubuntu is that it 
doesn't come with half a dozen install CDs. If we want to keep bloat to a 
minimum, we can't include everything a user will ever need out-of the-box. The 
idea should be to provide a good assortment of useful desktop applications and 
let users add to that as they see fit.

I think gnome-bittorent fits this nitch quite well. It's simple enough for even 
casual Bittorrent users to understand and doesn't significantly bloat the base 
install size.

Alex Vancina


> This is my first post to this mailing list. First of all, I'd like to
> thank the Ubuntu developers for putting together a good distribution.
> I'm using the Breezy preview release and I think that it is one of the
> best Linux distro's I've ever used. Secondly, I'd like to bring up the
> problem of BitTorrent users on Linux.
> 
> Ubuntu currently uses gnome-bittorrent. Unfortunately that program
> seriously lacks features. The most important thing is that it doesn't
> even ask which port it should use. So if you're behind a router like me,
> you're hosed, and you'll be punished with slow download speeds no faster
> than 10-20 KB/s, even if the torrent has hundreds of seeds and peers. I
> tried to forward the default port for bittorrent, 6881, but it didn't
> help.
> 
> Second problem is that it has no UPnP, so that router users wouldn't
> need to forward ports if their router supports UPnP.
> 
> Third is that it doesn't allow download speed limiting. This is quite
> essential for those who share internet connections. I'm behind a router
> with two PC's, my own PC and my brother's PC. If I can't limit my
> download speed BitTorrent could theoretically consume a huge amount of
> download bandwith, which could cause my brother a lot of lag if he would
> play a game over the internet on his PC.
> 
> Conclusion is, if you're behind a router and want to use BitTorrent on
> Ubuntu, the default client gnome-bittorrent is unusable. I'm forced to
> use Azureus. Azureus supports UPnP, it gives me very good download and
> upload speeds, and it allows download capping. It's downside is that it
> uses Java, it uses a lot of system resources and that it suffers from
> too much features, you can't call it a simple program.
> 
> What Ubuntu needs is a BitTorrent client which has the UPnP and download
> limiting features of Azureus, and the simplicity of gnome-bittorrent.
> Right now, BitTorrent users coming from Windows, who are used to great
> BitTorrent clients like BitComet, will be very disappointed in Ubuntu's
> BitTorrent capabilities. I hope the Ubuntu developers can think of a
> solution for this problem.
> 
> 
> 
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