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by freedomben7 hours ago |
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upvoteby zozbot2347 hours ago|
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It's a sensible option, even when not everyone can really use it. Linux distros are routinely transfered via torrent, so why not other massive, open-licensed data?
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upvoteby thot_experiment1 hours ago|
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I have terabytes of linux isos I got via torrents, many such cases!
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upvoteby freedomben7 hours ago|
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Oh as an option, yeah I agree it makes a ton of sense. I just would expect a very, very small percentage of people to use the torrent over the direct download. With Linux distros, the vast majority of downloads still come from standard web servers. When I download distro images I opt for torrents, but very few people do the same
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upvoteby Const-me2 hours ago|
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> very small percentage of people to use the torrent over the direct download

BitTorrent protocol is IMO better for downloading large files. When I want to download something which exceeds couple GB, and I see two links direct download and BitTorrent, I always click on the torrent.

On paper, HTTP supports range requests to resume partial downloads. IME, it seems modern web browsers neglected to implement it properly. They won’t resume after browser is reopened, or the computer is restarted. Command-line HTTP clients like wget are more reliable, however many web servers these days require some session cookies or one-time query string tokens, and it’s hard to pass that stuff from browser to command-line.

I live in Montenegro, CDN connectivity is not great here. Only a few of them like steam and GOG saturate my 300 megabit/sec download link. Others are much slower, e.g. windows updates download at about 100 megabit/sec. BitTorrent protocol almost always delivers the 300 megabit/sec bandwidth.

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upvoteby zrm7 hours ago|
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With Linux distros they typically put the web link right on the main page and have a torrent available if you go look for it, because they want you to try their distro more than they want to save some bandwidth.

Suppose HF did the opposite because the bandwidth saved is more and they're not as concerned you might download a different model from someone else.

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