I have a router I’m running nord vpn but I use bitTorrent on windows and I’m looking to switch. Does anyone have a flavor of Linux and program they use?
Any advice would be helpful I’m getting nowhere on forums.
Just use qbittorrent
I use qbittorent through Mullvad using Gluetun as qbt is running in docker.
DHT and PEX don’t seem to work though, I did brief research and it seemed related to mullvad no longer allowing port forwarding? I don’t know enough about how it works but I tried messing with it for several hours a couple days ago to no avail, only trackers appear to work for connecting to other peers.
On a headless Ubuntu LXC running in proxmox, I just access the qbt interface via its Web portal.
qbittorrent + mullvadvpn
(on debian 12)
Why Debian 12 specifically?
Generally most people get recommended to start their Linux journey with Mint as it is noob friendly (while still having full functionality) other options to consider would be popOS Ubuntu & Fedora.
qBittorrent is the most recommended I’ve seen, although I use transmission.
Why do you use transmission? Genuinely curious. The times I tried to use it, it seemed so basic and lacking functionality
For me, I like that it isn’t overcomplicated and just works. It being basic is a big pro to me.
Honestly, whatever floats your boat. There are many good options here, just try all and use the one you liked most. Or just go and pick one, or use the one that comes pre-installed in your distro.
Recommended ones:
- qbittorrent (my favourite as for many other in the comments)
- Transmission
- Deluge
- rtorrent (great if you run a headless server)
+1 to rtorrent
Qbittorrent: you can bind the application with a network interface and ensure all the connexion will use your vpn.
bonus: you can use it as a server (without any graphical interface) and manage the torrent with your browser. This way, you can create a torrentbox on a dedicated computer.
Yes, this is what I do, with Private Internet Access (VPN). You can bind qbittorrent to PIA’s interface, and also to its forwarding port.
Yeah, I just wish there was a way to automatically update the port whenever it changes. It doesn’t change often since my server tends to stay on 24/7. But when it does change, it would be nice to have it automatically update.
Back before my current server, I was just messing around with it in Windows. I discovered that qBit actually stores the forwarded port in the registry, and PIA has a terminal command that can print the currently forwarded port. I tried to write a quick .bat script to automatically run when the PIA network adapter connected. The goal was to grab the port number and update the registry for qBit any time the internet went out or my server was rebooted.
And it seemed to work fine. It launched when PIA connected, and pushed the new value to the registry. But that forwarded port was also apparently being stored somewhere else as well, because just updating the registry wasn’t enough; When qBit launched it still showed the old port number, even though all of the documentation I found said it was simply a registry value. At that point I just gave up and manually updated it every time I turned my computer on.
Ah, dang, I haven’t run into this yet. But I see what you mean. I actually just set this up in Linux, but back in Windows I didn’t run into this problem (maybe I was lucky enough to hit the same port, or maybe I didn’t have it set up entirely correctly, lol).
This is what I use. Once you get it working, it’s a great setup. I have it running on my mini HTPC under the hood, and it really doesn’t use much in the way of resources.
It has a webui that I can use to search and add torrents, and you can choose an alternate UI for the page if you want (I used VueTorrent, it looks better on mobile).
And, like others have said, you can bind it so that if your VPN disconnects, torrents won’t just keep running in the background.
Second VueTorrent. Makes for an absolutely blissful experience managing torrents and with qbittorrent’s built in search plugins you early have to go to the sites anymore
Asus WRT Router > Proton VPN
^
ProxMox EV
^
Debian 12 Headless VM
^
Docker Compose
^
Docker Engine
- Unbound
- Pihole
- Prowlarr (for indexers)
- Radarr
- Sonarr
- Lidarr
- Readarr
- 4 Instances of QBit for each ‘Arr
- Jellyfin
- Jellyseerr
- Traefik for SSL/TLS
- Homepage
Kind of a crude & simplified way of putting my setup but I think it gets the point across.
Just out of curiosity, why bother running 4 instances of qBit for the various *arrs? Why not just use automatic torrent management, and have the different categories download to different folders? My *arrs are all using a single instance of qBit, and each service simply uses a different category with a different download path.
The benefit is that I can see my total up/down speeds, ratios, etc very easily without needing to change to an entirely different instance. I can filter by category, or see everything at the same time.
+1 for the WRT router, if you can get a decent device with an enough powerful CPU it can host Transmission
Asus WRT Routers are great however, it doesn’t support certain Registrars for DDNS like Cloudflare so I had to install Merlin Firmware, ssh into the router and then manually configure a cron-job so that my A records stay up to date with my WAN.
https://github.com/clayauld/asus-merlin-cloudflare-ddns
Thankfully somebody already been down this path a posted the documentation which made things 100x easier.
My ISP uses CG-WAN so in order for me to remote into it, I had to set up Tailscale, the OS isn’t perfect but is way better than any consumer grade router in the market. I also use a custom firmware, modified version of OpenWRT that works with routers with modems.
I would also look in to I2P. Their are a few clients that support it like qbittorrent.
qBittorrent
I think it is even heavily used on Windows.
Transmission. Simple, fast, efficient.
qbittorrent
Did qbittorrent have memory leaks for anyone else? From time to time I’m forced to kill it because it’s make my pc unusable. Still my torrent client of choose, but I would like to know if this is something someone else experienced.
ive not experienced that in the almost 10 years of using it on multiple debian based distros
Removed by mod
Transmission
This with remote transmission on your phone to control it
Deluge and Surfshark VPN
You can torrent easily on Linux using any distro and any client.
It’s very unlikely you’ll have any issues.
