I left the high seas many years ago, but I'm down to seed for a cause.

What's the best torrent client nowadays?

Qbittorrent, Transmission etc. The Transmission daemon can be installed headless with negligible system load on a vast number of devices, from Raspberry Pi-like and smaller SBCs to Linux/BSD NASes, then operated from remote through the web interface or a phone app.

qbittorrent is still regarded as independent and safe, I think.

https://www.qbittorrent.org/

I’m still using it happily on windows/linux.

Don’t forget your vpn!

That brings me to the next thing: Taking VPN suggestions. What's the best? I like secure.

Edited to remove being a moron.

Mullvad. The only VPN company I actually trust.

It's important though that Mullvad doesn't do port forwarding; you won't be able to seed effectively

Then you probably don't want a free service that costs money to run where they can only make money by converting most users to paid or monetizing your information in a country where you are unlikely to have an attorney whilst operating what amounts to a honeypot for every government on earth.

That said protonvpn seems reputable

That's a fair point that I arrived at once I put half a second of thought into what I was actually asking.

I pay for proton. It works. I’m not as security conscious as I should be but it’s pretty much a set and forget thing aside from changing ports.

Proton VPN has port forwarding that lets you seed torrents.

Mullvad

proton

For desktop use from within Plasma/KDE I'm happy with Ktorrent. Feels very intuitive, and has no problem saturating a 1GB/s pipe, and doesn't slow the system down, while doing so.

(At least not mine, which are old and almost obsolete but have enough RAM)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KTorrent / https://apps.kde.org/ktorrent/

Otherwise follow the links from there to qBitTorrent, or its mentions from other commenters here. Am not fond of transmission at all. Feels slow and sluggish in comparison.

qBittorrent

mullvad is not a torrent client

Hey there seed buddy... I'm about to become the fourth web seed.

We're not going anywhere.

—Hydra

I'm seeing 1813 seeds right now

It's ridiculous that this has to be done.

I'm honestly speechless. But thanks for the magnet link.