I tried to download the recent xubuntu torrent via kget, but it’s painfully slow (almost never over 50kb, frequent stalls and pauses). I first thought it’s our network (internet is often painfully slow in our area), but when transferring the torrent to qbittorrent, download speeds went up to 2mb. I wonder what the reason is and if/how I can improve my kget experience?
Kget is still alive? I guess it is, but I lol’d :
This is the first time you have run KGet.
Would you like to enable KGet as the download manager for Konqueror?
Some torrent clients, iirc, block or ignore connections to less common, old, or unknown clients. Maybe kget is one of those, so you are seeing fewer peer connections?
Or Kgets uses other torrent settings that cause fewer peers to be seen or used:
You might need to manually forward ports in your router (it has no uPnP like Qbittorrent does) or enable UTP protocol. Those are about the only options you have available.
Just some quick guesses.
Don’t use KGet for anything muchless torrents. Use qBittorrent or Deluge.
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To be perfectly frank, I don’t see much point to KGet. I use yt-dlp for video content, there’s wget2, axel, and for torrents there’s qbittorrent which are all really good.
I always think of ‘download managers’ as a hangover from the Windows experience… they could feasibly be of limited use if you frequently download large numbers of files - ISOs and backups or whatever, then maybe it would be time to check out which ones work best.
Not many people talk about KGet, linuxlinks didn’t bother with any review and probably even fewer know anything about it… and a cursory search just told me that Arrowdl would be a much better option, about 22 MB in size - but still, why???
Kget to download a torrent is a bit like using Vuze (anyone remember that?) a Swiss Army Knife for putting in a screw - just get a screwdriver, it’s better.
Jack of all trades - Master of None.
Let’s apply basic logic here:
- Kget slow compared to qbittorrent ➠ Use qBittorrent
Glad we found the solution 
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You found a solution for yourself. Fine for you. I think I understand the approach behind the above comments. It seems to go like this:
- I want an app that does what I want - in this case, fast torrent downloads
- kget does not do the job (well enough) for me
- hence, I use another app. Whether KDE or not is of no importance to me.
Again, that approach is totally fine. But my approach is a bit different:
- The developer(s) behind kget had a reason to develop it.
- It is and official part of KDE
- Either it works, or it should be improved, or it should be removed from KDE. There is nor reason for a non-functional app to be advertised as part of KDE.
- It does work for some part, although suboptimally.
- There is no other “official” KDE download manager.
- I want to help improve the general KDE experience for other users
So, given my approach, I’d rather help improve kget (whether in functionality or in helping making it more intuitive or whatever) than just scrape it for another (non-kde) software.
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Have you tried KTorrent?
AFAIK Kget hasn’t had much work for a very long time.
Either it works, or it should be improved, or it should be removed from KDE. There is nor reason for a non-functional app to be advertised as part of KDE.
You can’t “remove from KDE“. KDE is the community/platform, and whatever comes by default with Plasma is a choice that belongs to the distros.
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cough ktorrent cough 
(sorry, I could not resist)
The thing is, I will venture this nifty relic that goes back to KDE 2 or early KDE3 is pretty simple and basic, and may be why it still works today with little to no maintenance, in terms of its bittorrent plugin.
I do suspect that manually forwarding ports and enabling UTP protocol might be enough to get you where you want with it, though I have not tried it myself.
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OP already knows, qbittorrent is far better… this isn’t about finding the best tool, it’s about stating that KGet is rather a blunt tool.
I appreciate your motive being to improve existing KDE software rather than abandoning it…
However, this is EXACTLY how open-source projects evolve… through people who care enough to invest in them.
I think there’s also a small misconception in your assertion that ‘either it works, or it should be improved, or should be removed’ framing.
I don’t think anyone includes KGet as a default software in any distribution… so I’m confident you explicitly installed it.
KGet DOES work, but it is not optimal for every case (hence ‘jack of all trades, master of none’).
It’s great for HTTP/FTP downloads, Metalink files - and that’s it’s original design purpose… Bittorrent is just an extra support for convenience - not a primary purpose.
It was never expected to compete with qbittorrent, or even ktorrent.
It’s more of a Swiss Army Knife than a Chef’s knife - and you wouldn’t choose it over a filleting knife to fillet a fish.
Anyway, the way to move on is to file a detailed bug report on KDE’s Bugzilla…
So include the exact torrent you tried, comparison speeds with qbittorrent, network conditions, and see if anyone picks it up.
Additionally, you could get KGet’s source and see if you can improve the bittorrent implementation (it will likely use kTorrent’s libraries).
The reality is KGet is maintained - it was released this year… but remember, the team of volunteers is small and they focus on what they know best.
They might not even know that torrent performance has an issue, so they could be happy to hear about it.
But just as we don’t remove Konqueror because Firefox exists, that’s just the wrong suggestion.
FYI I just decided to give it a test…
So I’d be unable to verify your claim without some specific information - this large ISO downloaded far quicker than I thought it would, totally maximising my connection for the duration.
Less than a minute for a 3 GiB ISO.
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OP never mentioned KTorrent, only QBittorrent and KGet.
And I disagree that QBittorrent is far better. I go back and forth between Ktorrent and Qbittorrent, and the only aspect where the latter is better than the former is the integrated search.
No, someone else mentioned KTorrent, and I looked it up and saw that KGet uses the same backend - but it’s not actually included by default, it’s an optional extra.
FTP sites. Not everything is a torrent.
And if you don’t like your archival HDD all fragmented, or if your connection is on the slow side, a download manager that queues sequentially is the way to go.
And thank you all for this discussion; I’ve used GetRight on Windows since forever, but the linux boxen don’t usually have download chores. Now that KGet has been brought to my attention, this may change!
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Yes, I mentioned that in the TL;DR bit in the middle - for moving things around, FTP/backups and stuff… so yes, there’s a use case for KGet.
In an actual test I maxed out my connection with KGet with a torrent, so there’s likely an issue with the OP’s specific torrent or configuration.
Obviously my case might be biased, as I have several items set up - like ‘Olympics’ from TVC, so that when they come around in another 4 years I’ll be getting them in timely fashion. I tend to use Prowlarr and/or knaben for my searches, so that’s not a big deal.
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