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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

> Most of us download our OS via torrents only

I mean, I only do it to stick it to the people who claim torrents can only be used for piracy; I think most people prefer the simplicity of direct downloads though…

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Docker images already need special handling since you download the layers separately and reassemble them. Going from that to full BitTorrent should be transparent to the users.

In fact, there already exist several implementations of it for Docker![0, 1, 2]

[0]: https://coreos.com/blog/torrent-pulls

[1]: https://d7y.io/en-us/

[2]: https://github.com/uber/kraken

I can usually max out my connection speed with torrents. This is rarely the case with direct downloads.

The start up time of a torrent is typically so long though, by the time it has connected to all peers and is downloading I have already downloaded the iso with a direct download anyway.

Soon, when QUIC is widely supported by the swarm (just needs updating to the current version), IPFS should be better than torrents for start-up delay, and much more importantly, it allows for sharing data across "torrents" when using content-defined chunking via rabin or buzhash. This means that things like common larger binaries get shared between images that include them, which should greatly increase the average amount of seeders for the chunks that make up an image.

There's a feature of linx-server that provides uploaded files with a torrent URL as well as a regular download URL. I believe the torrent client tries fetching data from peers as well as from linx (http).

https://github.com/andreimarcu/linx-server

On symmetric gigabit fiber only a few services, mainly steam and battle.net have ever given me 90mbyte/s download speeds. A surprising amount will limit to 500mbit or less, even if you have the download pipe for it.

Guess I just have slow internet :(

At least for Ubuntu and popular distros like mint you get super high speeds on torrent maybe because you have a peer in the same region.

Afaik Windows is also using this to install updates where it shares the download with others in the region (1) using p2p (though i may be wrong since i don't use Windows anymore)

(1) https://www.itproportal.com/amp/news/how-to-stop-windows-10-...

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