qbittorrent + mullvadvpn
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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(on debian 12)
Why Debian 12 specifically?
Just use qbittorrent
If you want a free VPN, you can try Riseup: https://riseup.net/en/vpn
There's qbittorrent for torrenting.
Generally most people get recommended to start their Linux journey with Mint as it is noob friendly (while still having full functionality) other options to consider would be popOS Ubuntu & Fedora.
qBittorrent is the most recommended I've seen, although I use transmission.
Why do you use transmission? Genuinely curious. The times I tried to use it, it seemed so basic and lacking functionality
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)
Asus WRT Router > Proton VPN
^
ProxMox EV
^
Debian 12 Headless VM
^
Docker Compose
^
Docker Engine
- Unbound
- Pihole
- Prowlarr (for indexers)
- Radarr
- Sonarr
- Lidarr
- Readarr
- 4 Instances of QBit for each ‘Arr
- Jellyfin
- Jellyseerr
- Traefik for SSL/TLS
- Homepage
Kind of a crude & simplified way of putting my setup but I think it gets the point across.
+1 for the WRT router, if you can get a decent device with an enough powerful CPU it can host Transmission
I would also look in to I2P. Their are a few clients that support it like qbittorrent.
Deluge and Surfshark VPN
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.
Transmission. Simple, fast, efficient.
qBittorrent
I think it is even heavily used on Windows.
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.
ive not experienced that in the almost 10 years of using it on multiple debian based distros
Deluge is another good client -- I'm not sure why but its defaults gave me much better download speeds than transmission or qbittorrent
You can torrent easily on Linux using any distro and any client.
It's very unlikely you'll have any issues.
Transmission
This with remote transmission on your phone to control it
rtorrent, you just need an ssh connection if wanting to know remotely what's going on
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.
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.
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.
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
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.