Popular Transmission BitTorrent Client Released For Windows (thenextweb.com)

An anonymous reader quotes an article on The Next Web: Transmission, one of the most popular BitTorrent clients for OS X and Linux, has finally arrived on Windows after roughly a decade in existence. The open-source file sharing app, developed by volunteers and available without ads for free, boasts a small footprint (about 25MB on Windows), support for encryption, a Web interface so you can control it through your browser, as well as the ability to set different speed limits for individual torrents. The current version isn't yet being actively promoted -- to download it, you'll need to head to Transmission's download directory page.

Comments

Most popular by design

[Anonymous Coward]

Because many distros like to include Transmission as a preinstalled package. Most notably you have Transmission installed with every Linux Mint desktop by default, among other junk.

Hell, I believe even Fedora Cinnamon Spin included Transmission.

Re:Most popular by design

[Penguinisto]

True, but damn it works rather well; it's one of the initial packages I install whenever I find myself with a new Mac.

Re:Most popular by design

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's pretty self-contained and doesn't need dependencies like Boost

Re:Most popular by design

[KGIII]

The Mac version recently had malware installed with it. There was quite an ado about it. It was dealt with reasonably quickly by both the Transmission team and by Apple revoking a certificate - it appears (IIRC) that the cert had been stolen and the upload site had the original replaced. I'm sure you can easily find more data about it - or may already know about it. However, on the chance that you don't and somehow still have that version, it's something you might wish to learn about. So long as, as I understand it, you've updated to a newer version (or downgraded to an older one) then you're all set.

Re:Most popular by design

[Coren22]

That was what I thought of immediately upon reading the headline, I was thinking of responding:

"So now Windows can be exploited just as easily as Mac!"

Re:Most popular by design

[KGIII]

Well, that's kind of a given, Transmission or not. ;-)

Small footprint?

[johanw]

Size is relative it seems. uTorrent is less than 1MB, and still fully functional (if you can find a 2.2 version somewhere). But I read webinterface, and we all know web "programmers" are not known for their efficient products.

Re:Small footprint?

[war4peace]

uTorrent also has a web interface. So does qbittorrent.
I'm trying to find ONE reason to use Transmission instead of any other torrent client currently available for Windows... can't find any.

Re:Small footprint?

[Blaskowicz]

uTorrent bundles crapware or spyware with updates, so it's to be considered to be actively user hostile.
Contrary to the good old Windows 98/XP days we can't trust freeware for everything these days, so get an open source torrent client.
The two I know best are Transmission and Deluge.

Transmission was already available as unofficial transmission-qt build

Re:Small footprint?

[johanw]

I did write version 2.2 for that exact reason. I'm still running 2.2.1. Some software is just finished.

Re:Small footprint?

[tsa]

As far as I can remember freeware has always been horrible on Windows.

Re:Small footprint?

[nine-times]

Isn't uTorrent adware verging on malware? Maybe I'm confusing it with another product, but a lot of the bittorrent software that has been available over the years has had problems with that kind of thing.

Transmission, at least, is completely free and open source. I feel like that should be worth something. Also, I think Transmission does have a web interface available. Admittedly I'm not 100% sure because I don't see the point in having a web interface, but whatever floats your boat.

Re:Small footprint?

[rdelsambuco]

I run Transmission on a server, then access it from a client via web interface. Thus my boat is floated.

Re:Small footprint?

[dj245]

Reminds me of Netscape in 2001 which was a 25MB+ download. Which didn't compare particularly favorably to Opera 5 @ 2MB, especially considering that Netscape had less features, a larger memory footprint, no tabs and crashed far more often. Transmission: 25MB - considered a small footprint/? uTorrent is what 1 or 2MBs? And is ad-free if you support it.

uTorrent has not been what I would say a "trusted" piece of software for at least a couple years now. It got bloated up and the company lost the morals at some point after version 2. Sure, you can run 2.2.1, the installer is still available, and at the time it was one of the best torrent clients available, but there are probably big security problems with using it in 2016. Not to mention I had some stability problems the last time I tried to use that version.

Re:Small footprint?

[Blaskowicz]

In theory someone may target that older version and figure out some bad data to send it and trip it up?
I'll agree it's good software that people depend on.
I used Winamp 2.8x and 2.9x for what seemed like, forever.

I regret not moving to Windows XP x64 when it was still current. I went to Windows 7 and was very disappointed by the bloat, this led me to using Linux on the main computer instead.

Re: Small footprint?

[Billly Gates]

I switched to qtbittorent. Free and opensouce and light since utorrent went the bad way

Re:Small footprint?

[javilon]

Please mod parent up.

Re:Small footprint?

[tlhIngan]

Isn't uTorrent adware verging on malware? Maybe I'm confusing it with another product, but a lot of the bittorrent software that has been available over the years has had problems with that kind of thing.

Well, uTorrent is adware, and even they found problems - which is why they run their ads as a separate process (the ads were crashing uTorrent!)

The easiest way to get rid of it is to find the "Updates" directory, then use NTFS permissions to deny yourself access to the utorrentie.exe file. (I delete all the permissions and disable inheritance - so the file exists, but the only thing I can do with it is twiddle file permissions as owner).

Re: Small footprint?

[n0creativity]

Some of us refuse to use software where the installer is adware\malware bundled out of principle. Any developer or download site that does this has lost my trust and my respect. Just because you write or distribute free software doesn't give you free reign to try to screw over the people using your software or website. I'd rather have someone charge for their software than stoop to the level of attempting to trick users into contributing to their revenue stream using shady\malicious addon crap.

Re:Small footprint?

[war4peace]

I haven't used uTorrent in a long time. Currently using qbittorrent which is working really well.
My opinion is that Transmission, however good, came to Windows way too late.

Re:Small footprint?

[fbobraga]

I run Transmission on a server, then access it from a client via web interface. Thus my boat is floated.

Try rtorrent: text mode and bloat-free to run via ssh :P

Re:Small footprint?

[Blaskowicz]

I think it's Vuze that I tried, from Azureus fame and what I got is an interface as overloaded as a Christmas tree, kind of want to be your Itunes, or Real Player or whatever. I remember when CD burning software attempted to be your "one true stop" for all your digital media, no thanks I just want to find the regular wizardless interface and burn the files.

Too many choices for that "one true way". Should I do everything from the torrent client, or a Windows CD burning program?, from Itunes? from an open source music player and library manager that also plays video? from a file server's web interface? from Metro apps on windows? from a smart TV? from a web browser?

Re:Small footprint?

[KGIII]

I've got an instance of Transmission that has run on a nearly dedicated connection for a very long time. It was rebooted about a year ago. It seeds over 140 (at last count) Linux distros. It does so without fail, without hiccup, securely, and with little resource usage.

Use what works best for you but that's been working just fine for me. It's one of the few dedicated Linux boxes that I had set up before completely switching to using Linux exclusively. It's been running on Ubuntu - still on an older LTS, for ages and I don't think it has been rebooted in over a year.

That works for me. However, what you use is entirely up to you (of course). Light doesn't just mean how much space it takes up - it doesn't even mean just how many resources it takes up on boot. How much RAM is eaten up by your torrent client after it has been open for a few months? Is it still stable? Does that even matter to you?

It really is about what works best for you.

Re: Small footprint?

[KGIII]

I wouldn't call it trickery if they make it clear and easy to get the information about what you're doing. Then again, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for those who just click without knowing what a click does. But, there are some that do not make it clear - those I have a problem with.

I can't say if that one made it clear or not, I've never tried it. I can say that the vast majority of those that I've used have made it clear enough and easy enough to opt out - so long as you read what you're doing. There are some who make it needlessly confusing and obfuscated and those fuckers need to die. Well, they need to at least get spit on in public.

But, to be clear, I don't mind it one bit if they make it clear that by leaving this box checked you'll be installing the Ask Toolbar. (Is that still a thing?) I don't even care if it is checked by default. I don't even care if it's mandatory that you install it - so long as they make it clear. If they don't make it clear then they can piss off.

Re:Small footprint?

[KGIII]

I did like early-on Nero's wizard for burning. It wasn't bad. I remember sticking with whatever version it was that came with a burner that I bought and installed. I then went and tried the newest version (at the time) and they not only wanted me to pay for it but it was everything and the kitchen sink - including a player that set itself as the default - and offered no advanced installation, meaning I had to go reset the damned things to get them back to normal. There was no way to install it without the player and, at the time, the player wasn't *needed* but helped for playing DVDs.

And it was a huge memory hog - at a time when memory was still fairly expensive. I want to say this was sometime around 2005 when I'd tried the new version (I was still mostly using Windows then). It was also a HUGE download. I'd recently moved and had no access to broadband at the house so I downloaded it at my office - it was that large. I'm going to guess that "large" was in the 80 to 100 MB area for the installer.

I seem to recall marveling, albeit disgustedly, at the vast amounts of RAM it consumed. It was a memorable thing, no pun intended and not in a good way. What was amazing was that it had gone to that stage so quickly - just a few short years.

It wasn't unique in those regards... It's like everything wanted to be the one piece of software you depended on. Tweak applications started to contain anti-malware, anti-malware got rolled into one, firewalls started to include anti-virus, music players wanted to subsume your whole experience, email clients wanted in on it too, browsers started to include everything, and more. To top it off, the bastards stopped using difference files and started making you download the whole program again instead of just updates.

I was kind of annoyed for a while.

Re: Small footprint?

[n0creativity]

I guess my experience with these things is that most of them make a concerted effort to hide the fact that it will install additional software as well as hiding the 'opt-out' option. Whether it's hidden in the 'customize' install path, the classic ass backwards phrasing so you have to read it 4 times to determine whether yes means no or no means no, the tiny checkbox next to or at the bottom of the EULA, the opt-out checkbox that doesn't actually do anything but instill false sense of security in the user, etc etc. I understand what you are saying and if the developer/site make it very clear, then I wouldn't consider it malicious, but I'm personally still not going to use the software and I'm definitely going to advise my peers, clients, and friends/family to stay away from it as well. Just consider that while the 'Ask toolbar' is relatively benign, sometimes it's impossible to find reliable information on the addon software and I don't know whether that developer can be trusted. Maybe an installer addon dev make an agreement with the distributor or software dev and the initial bundle is benign, but do I trust that software dev to review every change to the addon bundle? What if the 2nd or Nth iteration has something significantly more malicious or devious? It's too dangerous, in my opinion, to blindly trust that sort of thing. Like I said, I'd much prefer to outright pay the developer than to have it be bundled. If the software isn't worth paying for, then it's not worth the risk you take by letting an unknown entity be installed on your machine. Ps. I think Oracle actually includes the Ask toolbar in their damn JRE installer now

Re:Small footprint?

[pepsikid]

I set aside uTorrent_2.2.23071-FinalAdFreeVer.exe in case I ever had to use windows.
I miss the way uT is organized, but find it's easier to just run Transmission right on my NAS.

Re:Small footprint?

[war4peace]

Um... cool story but I was talking Transmission for WINDOWS versus other, already existing WINDOWS clients.

Re: Small footprint?

[jaymemaurice]

The worst part about such crapware is that when installing it, I may be aware of the bundled crapware... but whoever is using the computer after I install the software may update and install the crapware. It's especially annoying when the software is updated weekly and has pop-up reminders and the crapware is opt-out. I'm looking at you Java installer *shakes fist*

Re:Small footprint?

[war4peace]

Can a Raspberry Pi handle downloads or uploads at Gigabit-level speed?
I ditched my Thecus N2310 with Transmission for this exact reason: the downloads were capped at 13-14 MB/s and after 15-20 minutes of sustained transfers, the NAS would go tits-up: not responding to ping, inaccessible through any means, however LEDs on it would still show it as running.

Re:Small footprint?

[KGIII]

Depending on your version and what you're willing to do with it, you can do the same thing with Windows. Note that it is a dedicated box on a nearly dedicated connection.

You might have missed it but it was not a joke when I said you should use what works best for you.

Re: Small footprint?

[KGIII]

I agree in that if it's hidden or obfuscated then that's shitty. But, at the same time, we need to be realistic. Did they just keep clicking or did they actually take a quick second to scan? If they took a second or two to scan, understand, and elected to opt out - then it's not okay. It does mean the user should read (at least skim the damned thing) before clicking.

However, it shouldn't be something that requires more than skimming. If you have to stop, research, and it's confusing or hidden? They need to die in a fire.

Re: Small footprint?

[n0creativity]

The short answer is 'no'. From what I understand, the Pi uses its USB bus for the on board nic and it is limited to 100Mb. If you're just downloading 1 or 2 things and not seeding, it might do just fine, but between the slow USB bus and the significant CPU required to handle 1000s or 10s of thousands of simultaneous connections, the Pi is not exactly the best solution. When I used to use torrents more often, I found that even my cheap routers couldn't handle the sheer number of connections generated by heavy torrent usage. I had one, crappy, linksys that would crash every few minutes if I let loose too many torrents at once.

Re:Small footprint?

[pnutjam]

qbittorrent has an integrated search that I find very useful, I'm pretty sure Transmission does not.

Re:Small footprint?

[pnutjam]

I have qbittorrent on a server routed out via a VPN. It's configured so I can access it remotely on the normal network, but all other traffic goes out the VPN and dies if the vpn goes down (router handles all this).

Re: Small footprint?

[war4peace]

Thank you, confirms my suspicions.

Re: Small footprint?

[n0creativity]

Yeah, honestly, when I do use torrents, I run Transmission in a tiny Ubuntu server VM that I fire up on my home server. Nothing fancy, just an old desktop machine with enough RAM to run Server 2008R2 and HyperV plus a bunch of 3-6TB WD Red drives. The linux VM chows through the 2 vProcs I assigned it, but it doesn't affect the server as a whole and the download folder sits in an NFS mount pointing at a share on the windows server. The VM is also setup to use a VPN for dl traffic. All in all it took me about 3 hours to get it all set up and I would highly recommend it.

Re: Small footprint?

[Blaskowicz]

That's my main reason for having a few words against uTorrent.
The software itself, even perhaps the original installation, I could live with that.
But it is the software that introduced me to "software update wants to bundle crap", and that scared me away somewhat.

I also wonder if "bundled" software is considered normal because perhaps it does stuff like most Android software or Javascript does rather than being full-on malware.
I remember that in the late 90s/early 00s all forms of spyware were to be considered bad or virus-like, and also the crap that installed without your consent tended to open Internet Explorer pop-ups on its own (porn or otherwise), tried to dial a very expensive number to steal your money, replaced your web search (wait, this still exists right?).

I also have a friend who basically only uses youtube, file management, Windows Media Player (because that's what comes up), and email like once a month. He basically will never want to install anything, but there's a Firefox installed.
He asked me about messages like something says a driver needs to be updated.
I checked that one and it was a youtube advertisement! Now that's very banal, but I was surprised still to see a link (in localized language) to probable malware/crapware/badware hanging casually on one of the top 5 web sites.

So, for a user of the "don't install me anything!" kind who doesn't go to porn sites either there's still danger lurking around. So I had to install the ad blocker to protect against potential malware served on YOUTUBE, despite not giving a fuck about the ads on that computer (huge CPU/RAM resources available, etc.)

Finally!

[slashdice]

After adding malware support, windows support seems like a good next step.

Re:Finally!

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

They should have added Windows support first. Malware support just comes naturally after that.

QT-Transmission

[Anonymous Coward]

Transmission has had a windows client for years. I have been running QT-transmission on my win 7 box for 2 years

Re:QT-Transmission

[Sax Russell 5449D29A]

That is a fork and QT-based implementation of the original Transmission, although I have been using it myself too until I did a complete switch to Linux.

Re:QT-Transmission

[ncc74656]

That is a fork and QT-based implementation of the original Transmission

Since Transmission already uses Qt on Linux (and probably on Mac OS X as well), how much is really changing in the Windows version? (Been using it for years, BTW...mostly to monitor a remote instance that runs on Linux, but I'll occasionally spin up a local instance to download LibreOffice or whatever.)

Re:QT-Transmission

[Sax Russell 5449D29A]

Hmm, I've always had the GTK-based client on my Linux boxes. I see now that there is one version available in the repos labelled as 'transmission-qt', which I suppose is equally available, but used as a default only on non-XFCE DEs. My comfy knowledge bubble has burst. :-(

Tixati

[Harold Halloway]

I'm quite happy with Tixati, thanks, but welcome anyway.

Re:Tixati

[Harold Halloway]

I don't really use many private trackers so it's never been a problem - I only really download fairly mainstream stuff from places like kat.cr. But I'll bear it in mind.

Bitcoin miner

[Billly Gates]

Wasn't this the one with the bitcoin miner where you pay the electric bill for someone elses coins?

Re:Bitcoin miner

[Andor666]

Nope, that was uTorrent

http://www.engadget.com/2015/0...

Re:Why is Transmission still alive?

[Blaskowicz]

I was peeved at the UI at first, then grew used to it.
Clean window and then right-click / Properties to get stats, connected peers etc. and you can open multiple such windows, which are non modal.

The eMule-style UIs that look like defragmenter software were more useful in the days it took a week to download a movie.

'... finally arrived on Windows...'

[mlauzon]

Transmission has been available for Windows since 2010 -- if you go by the SourceForge project page -- using the name Transmission-QT. So, how is it 'finally available for Windows'?

Re:25kB

[jetkust]

No mistake. We're talking about a world where Notepad is 189KB.

Re:Why is Transmission still alive?

[fbobraga]

The eMule-style UIs that look like defragmenter software were more useful in the days it took a week to download a movie.

I second this ^^

uh?

[bobmajdakjr]

I have been using transmission on windows for years... It has always been the best...

Insightful? Really? More like flamebait.

[Roger Wilcox]

But I read webinterface, and we all know web "programmers" are not known for their efficient products.

...because every "programmer" that touches web technologies only produces shitty, barely functioning code.

...and those that don't touch web technologies never, ever produce code that is anything less than perfect.

...sounds like somebody is jealous that we get paid just as much to play with all the fun stuff.

Consider KTorrent on Linux

[Phil Urich]

Contrary to the good old Windows 98/XP days we can't trust freeware for everything these days, so get an open source torrent client. The two I know best are Transmission and Deluge.

I've long been a fan of KTorrent, and I find the interface personally better than Transmission, especially if you have large number of torrents (legally, of course! I'm talking tons of distro ISOs, archive.org concerts, etc . . . yup yup).