Recs.
Updated
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Very lightweight
Transmission-gtk uses only 17 mb of RAM in idle state and 24 mb in download state.
Pro Native Mac, GTK+ and Qt interfaces provide seamless integration with OSX and Linux systems
Transmission works well on OSX and various distributions of Linux due to having interfaces natively developed for those operating systems instead of haphazardly ported.
The Mac interface is written in Objective-C, uses dock badges and Growl notifications while the GTK+ interface follows GNOME Human Interface Guidelines and has support for popup notifications, desktop sounds, and a system tray.
There's also an unofficial port of Transmission-Qt for Windows.
Pro Full-featured
Transmission covers basics such as Prioritization, Selective Downloading, DHT, PEX, LPD and Magnet URIs. It has graphical, web and command line interfaces. It includes MSE/PE for security. Has UPnP, NAT-PMP, NAT traversal for automatic router configuration. Has UDP tracker and µTP data transfer protocol support. Even covers IPv6, Web seeding and Local Peer Discovery. And it auto-updates.
Pro Has a command line interface and a daemon
Transmission can be used in text-only mode via transmission-cli
that includes a daemon (transmission-daemon
), a CLI and a web client (accessed on http://localhost:9091 by default).
Cons
Con If data is corrupted, torrent file has to be re-added
If you delete a file that belongs to (finished or not) torrent, torrent will remain in "corrupted data" state and only way to restore it (aside from restoring the actual data file) is to find the original file and re-add it.
Con The app is hiding too much information
While the app is clearly going for minimalism, some users might feel that the default window that consists of just torrents and their progress bars might provide a bit too little information or functionality. For example, even accessing file lists requires opening up a separate window and navigating to a specific tab.
Con Written in Python, uses a lot of CPU on fast downloads
Apparently, the speed bottleneck is Python.
Recommendations
Comments
Flagged Pros + Cons
Con Files can't be downloaded sequentially
Sequential downloading can be used to stream media files such as video and audio while the download is still in progress. Transmission requires waiting until the complete file is downloaded before it's ready for use.
Out of Date Pros + Cons
Con No official Windows client
While there's an unofficial port of Transmission-Qt for Windows, it is maintained by a single developer and quality of the officially supported software is not guaranteed.