Deluge

After all the "traditional" clients like BitTorrent, µTorrent, and Vuze/Azureus have become so bloated and pretty much unusable, with horribly bad UX, over the past couple of years, it was finally time to get rid of my laziness and find a replacement. I have tried a few options, and quickly settled on Deluge and qBittorrent. There really isn't a bad word I can say about either.

Deluge is a very light-weight client with a well thought-out client and server separation. Which, however, you don't have to worry about if you're a regular user on a regular desktop computer. Just install and run, the daemon will be started in the background and the user interface will show up. Unless you switch to "thin client mode" and configure the server separately, it handles like any other, monolithic BitTorrent client.

And this principle works all throughout Deluge. Everything is really simple, easily understandable, in a clean and tidy user interface. If you need more powerful features, they're just a hop to the settings screen away. What's also nice is that many useful features which, however, not everybody will want to use, such as notifications or torrent labels/categories, are implemented as plug-ins that can be switched on and off at will.

I had Deluge set up on my Windows machine in no time, configured it to my liking within two minutes, and everything works as it's supposed to. It gives me a generally good impression, it seems like the people working on it know what they're doing, write quality code, and care about user needs. From the documentation and forums, they and the community also seem like a generally friendly bunch, and not an elitist club, which is always something that puts me off of some other open-source projects.

Important detail: Deluge is also a widely accepted client on private trackers, I haven't found any site that would disallow its use.

Deluge has quickly become my main BitTorrent client, and I can recommend it to anyone. Why Deluge over qBittorrent? Coincidence, really. I traditionally split my torrenting between two clients for different use cases. Deluge got assigned the task of main work horse, and I haven't regretted the decision. But you really can't go wrong with either of those two clients.

I've used and advocated Deluge for over a decade. As time has gone on, the quality of the software has significantly dropped, with massive catastrophic errors all over the place due to poor QA.

Where everything used to "just work" together with minimal config, now Deluge is a mess of non-specific errors. This means that not only is the software unreliable & unstable, but it won't tell you what's wrong with it, making troubleshooting impossible.

I cannot recommend anyone start using this now, as many major features (such as connecting to a daemon with a thin client) are broken beyond use with no fix in sight and no way to troubleshoot. I myself am looking for a replacement now since I can't take the appalling dev failures in recent years any more.