qBittorrent is a popular cross-platform BitTorrent client, available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. The developers just released Bittorrent 4.6, which has a few helpful improvements and drops support for older versions of Windows.
qBittorrent 4.6 isn’t a complete overhaul of the overall experience, but there are many smaller changes that add up to a great release. It adds experimental support for Bittorent over I2P, also known as “the Invisible Internet,” which aims to make torrenting more anonymous by avoiding IP addresses and specific networking ports. A few new settings are available, such as the socket buffer size and maximum torrent file size.
There are also some interface improvements. The “Watched folder options” and “Automated RSS downloader” dialogs have been redesigned, and there’s a new menu for editing torrent tags. You can also now edit the default theme directly inside qBittorrent.
The web interface has been improved as well, with improved synchronization, multi-file renaming, a new “add to top of queue” option, and some helpful fixes. The developers mentioned that the default login credentials must be changed when allowing the torrent server to be accessible through the internet, after some reports of people logging in with the default credentials popped up. A future release of qBittorrent won’t have default credentials at all, and it will require you to set up a username and password when enabling the web interface.
This release also drops support for Windows 7 and Windows 8, and now requires Windows 10 or later. Recent versions of qBittorrent are built around the newer Qt5 framework, which doesn’t work on older versions of Windows. That follows a trend we’ve seen this year with software finally dropping Windows 7 and 8, including Google Chrome (and most browsers based on it), Plex Media Server, and Google Drive. Valve also announced that Steam won’t work on Windows 7 and 8 starting in 2024.
You can download qBittorent 4.6 from the official website, and it should be available through package managers soon (if it isn’t already). It should work on any recent Linux distribution, Windows 10 and 11, and macOS 10.15 Catalina or later. However, the download page notes that macOS is not well supported right now — Mac owners are probably better off using Transmission.
Source: qBittorrent
