this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

rtorrent for me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

KTorrent (KDE) or Transmission (GNOME).

GNOME is the default on Ubuntu, Fedora and lots more. KDE is default on OpenSUSE, KDE Neon and Kubuntu.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This; Linuxserver Qbittorrent docker with gluetun to make sure all traffic goes through your VPN.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I don't use docker, so I just set the interface to the tun0 or whatever in the qbittorrent config.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

I use i2p for torrents exclusively. It's slow but totally private so I can seed without needing to mess about with a VPN.

There is a slightly smaller community but the people on there have similar tastes to me: linux textbooks, GOG games, jazz albums, etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Mullvad + Transmission

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Mullvad all the way

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Surfshark

Please don't use Surfshark

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

What's wrong with Surfshark?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I use qBitorrent with no VPN because my ISP don't give a fuck of what I'm doing with their data

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Anybody got a nix config for binding qbittorrent to mullvad easily?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

It’s like wearing 2 condoms except it feels the same as wearing nothing at all.

...I mean......

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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" :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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

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!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Wow, that's crazy. Could really get creative with your config using that!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

That's actually perfect, thank you so much! I've been wanting to switch from nordvpn because it's ass but i got 3 years for basically free, gonna switch to mull with this as soon as that runs out, awesome!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Why Debian 12 specifically?

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 week ago

Just use qbittorrent

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