Are y’all actually torrenting Linux ISOs. Cus I recommend. Its way faster and fun to have a collection of like 30 distros and try and new branch of the larger Linux tree. I just assume its a joke but I only started torrenting Linux ISO because of seeing it replied so much lol.

  •  m-p{3}   ( @mp3@lemmy.ca ) 
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    544 months ago

    I wish that most distros offered an RSS feed with magnet links for their releases. I’d just drop that in my torrent client and let it grab+ seed the latest version without any manual intervention.

  •  redcalcium   ( @redcalcium@lemmy.institute ) 
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    4 months ago

    I always torrent Linux ISO when I’m trying new distros. Can confirm it’s blazing fast to download with torrent. Distro ISO torrents are usually setup with webseed, so they’ll both download from the distros’ mirror servers AND the torrent swarm at the same time, so they’ll always be faster than the standalone http downloads.

  • Yes, I torrent Linux ISOs for any version or distro I want to install, and then I seed them until I download an updated version of whichever distro (and occasionally I’ll clean up old ones if I stopped using that distro but the version I have is ancient).

    But of course when we talk about torrenting in public forums, it’s funny to only mention all the Linux distros we are torrenting and remaining hush-hush about other things we may be sharing.

  • Just this week wanted to install ubuntu to a stick and, as you said, because it is everywhere metioned, i torrented it and it was pretty fast at around 160 mbit/s. Worked like a charm, now seeding.

      •  cecilkorik   ( @cecilkorik@lemmy.ca ) 
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        4 months ago

        The end result is exactly the same.

        The difference is that you can install an iso on a computer without an internet connection. The normal iso contains copies of most or all relevant packages. Although maybe not all of the latest and most up to date ones, the bulk are enough to get you started. The net install, like the name suggests, requires an internet connection to download packages for anything except the most minimal, bare-bones configuration. The connection would hopefully be nearly as fast if not faster than the iso and be guaranteed to have the latest updates available which the iso may not. While such a fast connection is usually taken for granted nowadays, it is not always available in some situations and locations, it is not always convenient, and some hardware may have difficulty with the network stack that may be difficult to resolve before a full system is installed or may require specialized tools to configure or diagnose that are only available as packages.

        In almost all cases, the netinst works great and is a more efficient and sensible way to install. However, if it doesn’t work well in your particular situation, the iso will be more reliable, with some downsides and redundancy that wastes disk space and time.

        Things like windows updates and some large and complex software programs and systems often come with similar “web” and “offline” installers that make the same distinctions for the same reasons. The tradeoff is the same, as both options have valid use cases.

      • It downloads the packages you need during installation, instead of using the contents of the ISO as a kind of “offline repository”. Depending on the distro and installer, it often downloads more up-to-date packages compared to a full ISO, so you don’t have to update the system instantly after installation.