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.
I use BiglyBt on Debian. I use BiglyBt because I previously used Vuze, and I used Vuze because I previously used Azureus. I don’t really remember why I went with Azureus originally, but it may have just been because it was popular at that time.
I get the impression most people use other bittorrent clients nowadays, but BiglyBt does what I need it to do. I never really used any of the “advanced” features of Vuze myself, pretty much only using it for torrents.
rtorrent for me.
qBittorrent
I think it is even heavily used on Windows.
Transmission
This with remote transmission on your phone to control it
qBittorrent! You can even add a search plugin directly in the client.
Was using Deluge before on Windows and for a while when I switched to Linux but started having issues with it.
You can even add a search plugin directly in the client.
Huh. Well, that’ll make things easier.
I personally like “fragments”, it’s quite a simple app though but it works great for me. Not sure if it works great with non-gnome setups though, since it’s a gtk app
I use qBitorrent with no VPN because my ISP don’t give a fuck of what I’m doing with their data
Where do you live?
SE Asia
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.
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
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).
If you need a daemon (to always run in the background, like on a server), use Deluge or Transmission.
If you just need a basic client that can live in your systray, qBittorrent.
There are 2 methods:
First method is to open preferences in qbit, under Advanced > Network interface, select “wg0-mullvad” from the drop-down menu. The interface might be named something different for you, but it should stand out as pretty obvious which one to select.
Other method is in qbit > Preferences > Connection, under “Proxy Server” select “SOCKS5” from the drop-down, input 10.64.0.1 as the host and 1080 as the port.
You could even do both these options at the same time if you like, there is absolutely no downside. It’s like wearing 2 condoms except it feels the same as wearing nothing at all.
Ah, so, I should’ve been more clear, I have annoying requirements, I want qbittorrent to run through mullvad exclusively, and i want them to be intertwined and startup with eachother automatically. I don’t want any of my other apps to be running in mullvad, is there a good way to do that? I think the socks5 proxy requires me to have it open and running, and thus everything would run through it, but maybe that wireguard method works around that? not sure, just wondering
If it was Windows, it would simply be a matter of configuring the Split-tunneling options in the mullvad app and it would work the way you want, but on to use the split tunneling feature in mullvad on linux is a bit clunky and doesn’t remember your settings so it annoyingly needs you to manually whitelist each app everytime you load it up.
What I do is I run mullvad in a gluetun docker container on my nas and have the environment variable “HTTPPROXY=on” set.
Then, I connect apps on my desktop computer to gluetun by going into the network settings of whatever app I want to route through mullvad and set the proxy settings to “HTTP proxy” <nas ip>:8888. I use these proxy settings for things like FreeTube and one of the web browsers i have installed that I want to use only with a vpn.
This will work if you set the http proxy setting in qbit, but if you are going to the trouble of setting up docker, you may as well have qbit running in a docker container too.
Maybe the best option for you is to install docker (even if you don’t have a server or nas, you can run it on your desktop), and run gluetun and qbit in docker containers, this will auto start on boot running headless in the background and the vpn wont interfere with the rest on you computer.
https://github.com/jamesmcm/vopono seems like this is exactly what I want, actually, might help you if you’re looking for a simpler solution! thanks for the advice anyway though!
I was in the same boat. I just want the VPN for my torrent client, without it impacting any other running applications/services. Try https://github.com/jamesmcm/vopono, which uses network namespaces and has killswitch functionality.
As for Nix, I have no idea.
Wow, that’s crazy. Could really get creative with your config using that!
It’s like wearing 2 condoms except it feels the same as wearing nothing at all.
…I mean…
As far as flavors of Linux, I would honestly recommend using VirtualBox while on Windows. You can download a preconfigured VM of just about any Linux distro or download whatever iso you want and install in a VM. This gives you some freedom to play around and break things (and you probably will at least once) and get more familiar with the different desktop environments, software installation, command line, searching for how to do things etc.
Weird thing to downvote, this is how I tested Linux since if I broke something or wanted to try a different distro I just deleted the VM and tried another. It’s way more annoying to distrohop once you’ve installed a system to your machine that also has all your files and configs set up.
qbittorrent + mullvadvpn
(on debian 12)
Why Debian 12 specifically?
I torrent a lot on Linux and use Qbittorrent. Surfshark has a great VPN on Linux.
If you want to get into it then Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr and nzb360 ($10) with Jellyfin is a great stack to manage your library but needs a bit of work to set up. You can then use the phone to download and search and watch it with an android TV app.
I had some issues setting it up with a ublue fedora immutable distro which are pretty non-existent on most standard distros.
Surfshark
Please don’t use Surfshark
What’s wrong with Surfshark?
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
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.
Nothing over here like that. Seems quite consistent on memory usage.
ive not experienced that in the almost 10 years of using it on multiple debian based distros
Never experienced this.
When I had memory leaks with software, the fault was usually old OS.
