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Add to SafariWhen comparing Transmission vs Virtual Box, the Slant community recommends Transmission for most people. In the question“What are the best Mac OSX apps for someone that's new to Apple?” Transmission is ranked 4th while Virtual Box is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Transmission is:
Transmission is free, ad-less and open source software licensed under GPL with parts under MIT with source code available [here](https://trac.transmissionbt.com/browser/trunk). Being open source allows anyone to check if the software has no malicious code, is secure and respects privacy.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Free, ad-less and open source
Transmission is free, ad-less and open source software licensed under GPL with parts under MIT with source code available here. Being open source allows anyone to check if the software has no malicious code, is secure and respects privacy.
Pro Very lightweight
Transmission-gtk uses only 17 mb of RAM in idle state and 24 mb in download state.
Pro Very minimalistic, straightforward design philosophy
Transmission is great for getting things done without looking too much under the hood. It still has advanced options, they're just tucked away from sight.
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).
Pro Works great on a seedbox with its web interface
Transmission has a web interfaces that can be used to remotely control torrents. It's great as a seedbox (a dedicated private server for uploading and downloading content) due to built-in webseed support.
Pro Pre-installed on multiple Linux distributions, including Ubuntu
For those who prefer Linux, the Ubuntu OS comes with Transmission already installed, so you can get your torrents up and running immediately.
Pro Headless software
Just put it on your server, SBC or even your old phone and you have your own torrent server.
Pro Compatible with Many Operating Systems
It works for Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD, and many others.
Pro Beginner friendly
A virtual machine can be set up in minutes if a ISO file to load is already available.
Pro Works well and fast for Windows host and Linux guest
Pro Free and open source
Pro Many free images available
Though most are linux flavors at https://virtualboxes.org/
Oracle's virtualbox site has others.
Pro Can do snapshots
Pro A lot of customization
VirtualBox has multiple virtualization options. Each one may be tailored to the guest operating system’s needs. This makes it especially good on virtualizing older systems, such as DOS, obscure distros, etc.
Cons
Con No preload magnet metadata
Transmission is unable to preload magnet metadata.
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 No broadcatching support
Broadcatching is a method of automatically downloading content as soon as it's available. Broadcatching in BitTorrent clients is usually implemented via RSS. Transmission requires manually selecting each download.
Con No super-seeding support
Super-seeding is an algorithm used to allow downloaders become uploaders quicker. Transmission lacks support for this functionality.
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 No tracker exchange
Tracker exchange functionality allows peers to exchange information about trackers of a given file. It is another way of ensuring that the file is downloaded from the optimal source. Transmission lacks this functionality.
Con No embedded tracker
An embedded tracker allows turning the client into a server offering an easy way of sharing files with others. Transmission lacks embedded tracker support so another method of sharing or different client has to be used to share files.
Con Written in Python, uses a lot of CPU on fast downloads
Apparently, the speed bottleneck is Python.
Con No built-in search engine
Built-in search engines allow finding torrents to download right from withing the torrent client. Transmission lacks such functionality.
Con No proxy server support
Con Lacks video performance
Virtualbox has a hard cap of 256MB of video memory. This could make newer operating systems run slower.
Con Minimal CPU customization
You can only enable/disable certain features. You cannot cap the speed of the CPU, which is required to run systems such as Windows 95.
