uTorrent has napalmed the last of its bridges, first by bundling adware with its installer and now, allegedly, a Bitcoin miner. If you’re ready to ditch uTorrent, there are plenty of alternatives available.
This post was originally published on Gizmodo Australia.
Rather than figure out the best options yourself through trial and error (and a cycle of installs and uninstalls), gHacks’ Martin Brinkmann has already done the hard yards, selecting a few of the top clients for users of any platform.
His personal recommendation is qBittorrent, which can be installed on Windows, Linux or OS X and comes with an interface similar to uTorrent, without the ads and other bloatware. If you’re on Android, Flud is worth a look, while another popular cross-platform option is Deluge, a good choice if you’d like to run a remote torrent server.
It’s hard for OS X users after something straightforward to go past Transmission, though it’s also available for Windows in the form of Transmission-Qt Win.
In my opinion, a great option if you have a NAS or other embedded system (such as a Raspberry Pi), is to run a lightweight torrent server and just connect to it via browser. It takes a little setting up, but it’s easily accessible from any LAN-connected device and acts as a centralised repository for downloaded content.
uTorrent bundles Bitcoin Miner, time for some alternatives [gHacks]
Comments
16 responses to “Leave uTorrent Behind And Try These Other Torrent Clients”
Welcome to advice from 2013. Most savvy users ceased using Utorrent two years ago and to be honest stopped using torrents last year!
i tip my fedora to you
I tip my red hat to you sir.
And might I ask, where do all the savvy internet users go instead of getting torrents?
Google is your friend.
How’s the weather up there on your pedestal mate? Was a pretty simple question – I can obviously google it and find tens of different ways to accomplish what I want without torrents – If you are going to preach that this is old news how about sharing an update instead of being pedantic?
The best way to obtain information from people is to be rude to them? Never worked for me. BTW the weather is fine, sunny and 28ºC up here in Knowitall land.
I was no longer expecting an answer, just pointing out that you were being a dick about it.
Could you please post what the alternative to torrents is? I’m not sure that my searches will return the result you’re thinking of, and I would appreciate it if you could share it.
If you suggesting usenet, tried it and it sucked, way more content available via torrents, a good VPN and qBittorent and I’m laughing.
that’s it. we need more of you spreading the message. Usenet-no good. pass it on.
like its some big secret, usenet die hards crack me up, yeah it was underground like 5 years ago.
Uh, I didn’t on both accounts
I guess it’s only a matter of time before a really popular piece of software gets turned into an adware-installing piece of crap.
Oh well. That is why there are always alternatives. qBittorrent here I come.
For qBittorent, can I put in all my PrivateInternetAccess proxy details and stuff?
Deluge allows you to use a proxy, and even to use different (or no) proxies for different services. I use the Linux version and find it better than uTorrent was on Windows.
yes I’m using PIA with qBit.
uTorrent at least on Windows already installed a whole bunch of crapware even before this. Hopefully this debacle forces companies to look at its policies a bit more carefully from now on
Anybody with half a brain is still rocking Utorrent 2.2
4 years old and still the best.
No one said you had to keep updating as they introduced the bloat.
http://www.oldapps.com/utorrent.php
Your welcome.
“you’re” welcome
or moved to qbit, deluge etc and can use up to date software that runs better than 3 year old uTorrent.
The allegation was that uTorrent silently (without authorisation from the user) installed this miner. Is that true or not?
Lots of freeware comes with bundled crap which you can decline at installation. If it installs it anyway then that is a reasonable explanation for the outrage. If not, I am not sure that the outrage is all that sensible. I think including a miner sucks, but given how resource intensive some adware itself can be it doesn’t seem leaps and bounds worse. . . Unless I am missing something.