When I first installed and ran Fragments, it was a breath of fresh air. Powerful but minimalistic, intuitive but uncluttered. It was the cleanest and most usable BitTorrent client I’d ever used on any operating system. Very reminiscent of the streamlined “do one thing perfectly” apps you see in the elementary OS AppCenter.
Well, GNOME developer Felix Häcker wasn’t content with it being merely awesome. The first beta for Fragments 2.0 shows some serious improvements.
To begin with, Fragments 2.0 has been rebuilt from the ground up using Rust, GTK4 and Libadwaita.
In a very informative Twitter thread, Häcker explains that the architecture is now completely modular. In practice, that means you can now use Fragments as a remote control for Fragments (or for Transmission).
If I had one criticism about this BitTorrent client, however, it was the lack of options for power users. It didn’t need to an overwhelming amount of tweaks, but it needed a few basics. The developer’s been listening to feedback like this!
New BitTorrent Client Features
Fragments 2.0 adds useful features like a statistics tab, showing overall bandwidth usage and uptime for the current session or overall.
It also includes a few frequently requested options like setting a specific download directory. And the ability to save incomplete torrents in a separate directory is a nice touch.
Häcker wants the final release of Fragments 2.0 to be “as bug-free as possible,” so let’s help him test the beta! You can get a direct download of the flatpak.ref file right here. Note that launching the downloaded file should open up your software center and display an install option version 1.9.1. That version doubles as the 2.0 beta.
By the way, since this is distributed as a Flatpak, you don’t have to be running GNOME as your desktop environment to enjoy Fragments.
If you’re not setup for Flatpak on your distro of choice, Flathub.org has you covered with these quick setup instructions. Just click your distribution’s logo and you’ll be guided to some (sigh) command line instructions.
Random rant: in order for Flatpak to gain wider usage and exposure on popular distros like Ubuntu, it really needs a simple graphical installer. Does one exist? If so I’d love to know about it!
