gnome-bittorrent is an unsatisfactory bittorrent client

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2005 at 05:32:35PM +0200, Sander van Loon wrote:
> 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.

I'm behind a NAT, forwarding port 6881, and it works splendidly for me.

> 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.

If you know of a program which you feel is more suitable, feel free to
suggest it here.  gnome-bittorrent does work well for many users and is very
simple.

-- 
 - mdz