Transmission BitTorrent Client 4.0 Released With Major Improvements
After almost 3 years since the previous release, Transmission BitTorrent client 4.0 has been released today. This major new release includes changes like code migration from C90 to C++, GTK 4 support, rewritten web client, support for BitTorrent v2 and hybrid torrents, performance improvements, and more.
Transmission is a lightweight, free and open source BitTorrent client for Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux. It comes with GTK+ and Qt GUIs on Linux and BSD, a Qt-based Windows GUI and a native macOS GUI. It can be used without a GUI too, using the headless daemon for servers and routers, and there's also a web UI for remote controlling both this headless daemon, and the GUIs.
The application user interface is designed to be easy to use, while also providing powerful features like speed limits and schedule, watch directories, bad peer blocklists, UPnP and NAT-PMP port forwarding, and much more.
Transmission 4.0.0 release highlights:
- Support for using BitTorrent v2 torrents and hybrid torrents
- Users can now set “default” trackers that can be used to announce all public torrents
- Newly-added seeds can start immediately and verify pieces on demand, instead of needing a full verify before seeding can begin
- Added an option to omit potentially-identifying information (e.g., user-agent and date created) when creating new torrents
- The Web client has been rewritten and now supports mobile use
- When creating new torrents, users can now specify the piece size
- IPv6 blocklists are now supported
- code modernization:
- migrated from C90 to C++.
- the GTK client has been ported to GTKMM
- the web client has been rewritten in modern JavaScript and no longer uses jQuery
- the GTK client now supports GTK 4
- The Qt client now supports both Qt5 and Qt6
- less memory and CPU usage: “For example, a stress test of starting transmission-daemon with 25,000 torrents is almost entirely IO-bound, using 50% fewer CPU cycles and 70% fewer memory allocations than Transmission 3.00”
- the macOS client is now a Universal (Apple Silicon and Intel) application
This release includes many other smaller changes. See the official release notes on GitHub.
It's worth noting that support for creating BitTorrent v2 and hybrid torrents is not yet implemented, but it should come in an upcoming release.
Note: The screenshot at the top of this article is of Transmission 3.0 (GTK interface) due to the lack of Transmission Linux binaries at the time I'm writing this.
You might also like: exatorrent Is A New Self-Hostable BitTorrent Client Featuring A Responsive Web Interface, Streamable Torrents
Download Transmission
Transmission is available to download for Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux. At the time I'm writing this article, there are no Linux binaries available for download, nor has Transmission been updated in any repository (even on Arch Linux).
Transmission BitTorrent client 4.0 will likely be available to install from FlatHub soon, which is compatible with most Linux distributions.
