I should point out first that as my C skills are not remotely up to
producing patches for GTKG, this message consists entirely of hand-waving,
and you are welcome to ignore it :>
However, I have spent a fair amount of time using both clients, and there
are some interesting comparisons to make about their general usability
and efficiency. This is GTKG 0.92 (GTK1 GUI) versus LimeWire 3.4.4 on Linux.
I have traced my build problems with GTKG 0.92 to a defective glibc-2.3.2
binary package, which is now fixed, and I'm happy to report that GTKG
builds and runs without a problem on my i686-pc-linux-gnu. This means I
can compare apples and apples, as both clients are running as leaf nodes.
Wins for GTKG
* Stable/low memory footprint
* Configurability
* Bandwidth throttling/reporting
* Powerful filtering
* Select downloads by regex
* Network stability
Wins for LimeWire
* Seems to find more sources
* 'Chat/Browse host' functionality
* Downloads display
General
LimeWire is written in Java and thus eats memory like it's going out
of fashion. Almost nothing else will run on my (128Mb) machine without
swapping (and LimeWire tends to crash if it's short on memory). So the
first big win for GTKG is its stability and memory footprint. It also
allows far more tweaking than LimeWire - the most useful tweak being the
ability to set the total input and output bandwidth for each category of
traffic. LimeWire, by contrast, will happily eat your entire link, to the
chagrin of anyone who happens to be sharing it.
User interface
LimeWire scores here particularly in the Downloads screen. It has a nice
progress bar for files, and can show a single progress bar for files which
are being swarmed from multiple hosts. It also displays the progress and
ETA for the whole file, not just for the current chunk.
However, there seems to be no way in LimeWire to re-queue an active download
(to free up more bandwidth for another file, for example). You can only
kill the download altogether.
LimeWire's display of search tabs is rather better than GTKG's if you
have lots of searches open. It can show them all on the same screen rather
than having to scroll (slowly and painfully). However it doesn't seem to
be able to auto-repeat searches.
Although GTKG has a very powerful filter and rules engine, the interface
is awkward. The rule browser, for example, is not resizable and the window
is so tiny that it only displays one rule at a time. If you have a great
many auto-download rules set, for example, this can be a pain to edit. The
ability to search/select downloads by a regular expression is one of GTKG's
biggest scores. I use this all the time.
There seems to be no way in LimeWire of displaying the total I/O bandwidth
currently in use, which is a shame.
Performance
In general GTKG seems smarter about recognising when files are the same,
and more tenacious and aggressive about getting hold of them. LimeWire
does not recognise that files with different names are the same, and so
the downloading engine wastes a lot of bandwidth this way.
However, LimeWire seems to produce more search results and more sources,
though this is just a subjective estimate. It is not very active in
pursuing them, though, and tends to need manual intervention to 'force
resume'. My version does not appear to recognise when a downloading host
has gone offline and it needs to search for more sources - the download
is shown as active but running at 'OK/s' and never goes anywhere.
LimeWire takes a while to get stable on the network, and responds badly to
crashes or network interruptions. GTKG, on the other hand, seems to deal
better with this. I would definitely prefer GTKG on a slow link or where
it had to run unattended for a long time.
Features
The chat function is not something I ever use, but the ability to browse
a host is very useful and something I have long missed from Napster. If a
host has one file you want, it might well have more files you didn't know
you wanted.
I may be wrong, but GTKG does not seem to be able to automatically re-scan
the upload area. This leads to some false search hits if you move or
delete files, and it does not add newly downloaded or partial files to
the catalogue.
Conclusion
In summary, then: Limewire big, slow, unstable, basic. GTKG small, fast,
stable, flexible.
LimeWire features I would like to see in GTKG: better download display,
better handling of search tabs, host browsing, auto-scanning.
Unlikely dream feature (which LimeWire doesn't have anyway): connecting
to other networks (FastTrack, eDonkey).
--
"I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords."
- Kent Brockman, "The Simpsons"
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