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.
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).
qbittorrent.
Transmission
This with remote transmission on your phone to control it
I use qBitorrent with no VPN because my ISP don’t give a fuck of what I’m doing with their data
qbittorrent
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 + mullvadvpn
(on debian 12)
Why Debian 12 specifically?
You can torrent easily on Linux using any distro and any client.
It’s very unlikely you’ll have any issues.
Linux Mint OS, QBitTorrent for the client, Proton VPN for the VPN with qBitTorrent bound to only that interface and port to ensure no IP leaks.
Works Awesome.
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?
Deluge is another good client – I’m not sure why but its defaults gave me much better download speeds than transmission or qbittorrent
rtorrent for me.
Mullvad + Transmission
I just run rtorrent with vopono/openvpn in a tmux sesession on a raspberry PI. It can be a bit of a pita getting utmp working though.
rtorrent, you just need an ssh connection if wanting to know remotely what’s going on
