I used to use Ktorrent for downloading Linux ISOs and getting free music from Jamendo. It worked well, but suffered from a lot of overhead, as was a KDE application and had to load a whole bunch of extra components. Plus (and I’m being charitable here) DHT didn’t work quite as well as one might expect.

Now, changing software is a bit of a big deal. I had a lot of settings tweaked in Ktorrent to get it right to where I wanted. Yet, when I typed aptitude install deluge-torrent and ran the thing, I was P2P-ing in literally a minute or so.

From a functionality standpoint, Ktorrent had always been all right, but not amazing. It lacked certain things, one of which was a simple layout and a nice skin. Frankly, it looked like a KDE application, and that’s not a compliment. And while it got the job done, I was always looking out something more like uTorrent, which is the gold standard in Torrent apps.

Or was. Deluge has most of the features of Azureus (that bloated hunk of crap), is free and open source, runs on Unix and Apple and has an alpha build on Windows, has a plug-in architecture, is functional, lightweight, and pleasing on the eyes.

Deluge is, in my opinion, the new gold standard in Bittorrent software.