A little while back I was looking for a torrent client for Linux.

My first shot was KTorrent, version 1.0 or 1.1 back then. But I didn't like it at all. It popped up errors when the tracker was not available, and after one night of downloading you had to click away 37 error messages. KTorrent wasn't patient enough to wait for a tracker response.

So I continued my quest and installed QTorrent. It did the job nice, at least it accepted the fact that a tracker doesn't respond immediately after the first request. But somehow I didn't like it, downloading seemed to go too slow (and no KDE Inside™).

Then, I tried ctorrent, a console torrent client. This was real basic stuff, but it did the job. But I wasn't able to set a upload bandwidth limit, resulting in slowly loading webpages.

Meanwhile, KTorrent was entering the 1.2 release, so I thought to give it another try. I was blown away. It has everything a good torrent client should have. No more annoying popups but instead nice features you wouldn't even see in Windows torrent clients.

For me, the most useful options are:

• Embedded KHTML which allows quickly search 'n download.
• Previewing media during the download. As far as I know, KTorrent is the only client which allows you to listen to a 33% completed MP3 file.
• Setting the upload rate limit with DCOP (probably my favourite feature). Very useful on a laptop which switches networks everyday.
  So when I'm at the university, I press the button with the two arrows up, which means: unlimited uploading. When I'm at home I can quickly switch to 10 kB/s or 40 kB/s. No need to go to the configure dialog over and over again.

(Maybe some of those options were already included in older versions, but I've never tried/discovered them because I got too annoyed of all those error messages.)

To conclude, KTorrent 1.2 is the best torrent client out there (taking the Windows clients into account as well).