A few days ago, i heard the suse team are looking for a new default torrent client for Suse 11.0. So of course I jumped in saying "Well, why not Monsoon?". So i fired off a response with a ton of links suggesting that Monsoon was the most amazing torrent client ever and there was no need to review any other clients. Of course that didn't work, but Monsoon has been taken into consideration as a viable candidate.

Andrew Wafaa took it upon himself to do a little review of his own, and Monsoon fared pretty well. I was happy enough with that. Some of the points mentioned on the thread include:

1) Applications which need wizards are bad. For a default client, you want something rough and ready.
2) Something minimalistic but packed with features is good. No massive complicated apps like Azureus.

Of course, 2 is a bit of a contradiction. It's quite hard to get both. In GUIs to expose a feature or some statistic, you need a new GUI element. So there's a fine balancing act between keeping the GUI clean and small while still exposing all the nice features in an easy to use way.

Here's a few screenshots of Monsoon anyway, which i hope expose the full diversity of what it can do.



The first time you start Monsoon, you aren't greeted by a wizard, everything is set up nicely for you. Everything is shown to you by default.





When you load torrents, they automatically start. If the files already exist (like the kubuntu one did), monsoon check that file to see how much of it is valid data and then resume the download using it. Standard stuff.





The ramp-up time is fairly fast. After 30 seconds Monsoon can connect to 50 people (the default limit for a torrent). Note, it is smart in how it connects to people. It doesn't have more than 5 pending connection attempts at any one time. This prevents overloading of cheaper routers.



For the people out there who want a really minimalistic client, you can hide everything. The GUI can be reduced down to something even slimmer than Transmission should you so wish. There is also plans to implement a mini-mode, which will consist of just a single progress bar per torrent.





So what if you want to set the global upload/download rate? Why, it's simple! Just click on the global upload/download speed indicators and away you go.





If you want to organise your torrents, it's just a simple context menu. You can add/remove/rename the labels with a right click, or double click. Slick, eh? There is also a patch in the works which will allow you to drag'n'drop torrents from the main view into a label and drag'n'drop them between labels. This will replace the existing way of doing it which involves ticking checkboxes in the 'Options' menu.