Transmission, one of the most used BitTorrent clients, is now available for Windows. The community driven application has had a dominant presence on OS X and Linux distributions for more than a decade, and brings a "fast, easy and free" experience to the Windows platform with its first official release.

Transmission is one of the oldest and most used BitTorrent clients. Since its first release in 2005, the free, multi-platform application has gathered a steady user-base of millions of users.

Transmission is one of the most-used Mac BitTorrent clients as well as being the default BitTorrent client on various Linux distributions.

However, despite being more than a decade old official support for the Windows operating system has always been lacking. This changed earlier this month, when the first Windows build was added to the download directory.

Users who try the Windows version will notice that it’s very similar to the releases on other platforms. All the features are in the same place, and the look and feel is pretty much identical as well.

TorrentFreak spoke with Transmission developer Mike Gelfand, who’s in charge of the Windows project. He tells us that a lot of progress has been made in recent months and that the official Windows release will be added to the download page after the next version comes out.

The big question is, however, why Windows and why now?

Mike explains that the idea came from a conversation he had with Transmission developer Jordan Lee, who noted that the lack of Windows support was the “biggest missing feature.”

“Since then I saw many people showing up either willing to use Transmission on Windows since they already use it on another platform, or looking for an alternative to their current BitTorrent client on Windows for this or that reason,” Mike notes.

Transmission for Windows



Since the original developers had little experience with Windows coding, Mike decided to take on Jordan’s proposal and join this part of the project.

On the one hand, the goal was to make Transmission’s “fast, easy and free” experience available to Windows users. Secondly, an official release simplifies life for people maintaining unofficial forks.

And so, after several months of active development, Transmission for Windows arrived. Thus far the release hasn’t been actively promoted, but it has been picked up by Ghacks and a few other places already.

Mike stresses that the project is still in active development and that more changes and features are likely to be introduced in the near future. Thus far, it is pretty much a copy of the core Transmission client without any additional features.

“The only difference right now is that it runs on Windows. We’ll see how it goes, some features could be added later on which are specific to Windows and aren’t needed on other platforms,” he says.

Those interested in giving Transmission for Windows a spin can download the client here.