On the Subject of Vuze*

"I'd rather go naked than use Vuze"

At one time I had a lot of love for Azureus. I was never that keen on it being written in Java but, hey, it did what I wanted with minimum hassle and Just Worked. Unfortunately, creating a useful and solid bit of software wasn't enough for the developers, so they had the bright idea of going all next-generation and turning good old Azureus into some bloated media portal server bullshit cunt-fest. In other words they turned it into Vuze, and Vuze is an unmitigated piece of shit.

I don't have crazy requirements for my torrent client, but I do need it to:

• run on linux. And preferably not via Wine (i.e. no uTorrent). My torrent box is a linux box, and that's not going to change.
• support blocklists. For obvious reasons.
• have a remote gui app available (at the very least for Windows) so that I can associate .torrent files with it and automatically send them to the torrent box when I download them from websites from either my laptop or desktop machines. I know this functionality can usually be achieved with the various web interfaces that most torrent clients offer these days, but it's sometimes useful to have a standalone app. I was using AzSMRC for Azureus.
• not be blacklisted on sites I frequent.

What I don't need is all the social networking, upnp media server, community bullshit that they've added to Vuze. I need a solid, reliable, stable torrent client that I can run 24/7. At a push I could live with Vuze (by turning off all the extraneous crap) if they hadn't managed to break the fundamentally decent client on which it was built. What do I mean by "break"? I mean that the more recent versions of Vuze are now blacklisted by some torrent sites because of the excessive load they put on trackers and/or for being "non-standard". That's a pretty good indication that you've fucked up your client.

And to add insult to injury, for the last few versions they've had the nerve to pop-up donation requests. As if I'm going to give them money for being a bunch of fucking idiots and breaking software I liked. Fuck off.

Anyway I had downgraded to an older version which had been creaking along with the occasional error message. But the straw which broke the camel's back was when, following a Java update, it finally went tits-up, seg-faulting Java on startup. Of course the latest Vuze still worked. Or, rather, "worked", but that's a fat lot of fucking good when it's banned by the trackers I need to use. So finally it was time to stop beating the shit out of that particular dead, diseased horse, and go back to basics. Deluge caught my eye mostly because of its Python core, but after running into some technical problems getting the web UI to work I've settled on Transmission for now. It does what I need (and the Transmission Remote GUI app is excellent), it doesn't do a load of fucking shit I don't need and it was easy and painless to get running. And it's not blacklisted by the trackers I use. I just hope they don't try and turn it into some ill-advised multimedia hub clusterfuck like Vuze.

* yes I know it's not a game