Hello,
At Sun, 10 May 2020 19:36:39 +0200 Colin Finck wrote:
While I like people who take the initiative, I
haven't seen torrents
widely used for open source software distribution for at least a decade.
Not true. Debian project regularly distributes it's ISOs using
torrents/magnet, and the same is true for LinuxMint, LibreOffice,
FreeBSD, Fedora, etc.
Many of these projects have their own private trackers setup. And you
can see their stats:
http://bttracker.debian.org:6969/stat
As you can see, debian-10.0.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso was downloaded 27894 using
the torrent network.
https://torrent.fedoraproject.org/stats/current-stats.json
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Torrents
http://openbsd.somedomain.net/
Whenever I encounter a slow download these days, I can
always choose an
alternative mirror that is faster.
Well, they are not always available and as far as I know the torrents
tend to be more distributed and allow download "acceleration" by design
(I mean downloading several file pieces at the same time) whereas with a
simple HTTPS mirror you remain dependent of the bandwidth of 1 server.
In Debian website they even provide an explanation about why one should
use the torrents: «It puts minimal load on our servers because
BitTorrent clients upload pieces of files to others while downloading,
thus spreading the load across the network and making blazing fast
downloads possible».
Regards.
JJ