Azureus is a no nonsense that’s both cross-platform and open-source. While the latter might not matter for you, unless you want to dig into some Java code and have the knowledge to do it, the former is pretty important for those using Linux or Macs outside the Windows world. If you’re not a diehard Linux or Mac OS fan, it’s at least convenient to know that the application will be there when you decide to boot into another OS. You might have seen some Java apps before which were slow and a bit ugly, but Azureus has a fast and pretty slick GUI.
The simplistic interface also hides a pretty functional options palette. You can tweak pretty much anything – BitTorrent protocol speeds for upload and download, directories for storing the torrents and directories for storing the downloaded files, tracker timeouts, etc. Azureus has one of the widest international support, as 32 languages are listed on the product’s download page. This BitTorrent client supports Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai and Turkish localizations.
The only annoyance that I’ve noticed is that it takes a while to load Azureus. Nevertheless, once it’s up and running, it’s pretty fast and convenient. This client is pretty stable and takes about 1.9 megabytes of RAM running under Windows XP.
