Bearshare comparisons from Google thread by Yousuf Khan
groups.google.com
Hi, I've had a chance to try out extensively about five different Windows
Gnutella servant applications, and I have had a chance to come to a
conclusion about them. I find a lot of people just try out one of the
applications and never bother to check out the others out there. There are a
lot of differences, and not just in features, but also in how well they
connect to the network; which is surprising, as they should all be equal
theoretically. I've tried Newtella, Bearshare, Gnotella, Limewire, and
Gnucleus.
Newtella: very primitive, avoid. It is restricted to only downloading music
files; you cannot search all of the universe of other files available on the
Gnutella network. This focus on music would be great if they added some
music-specific features, such as playing music as it downloads, or viewing
the internal header info MP3 files, but it doesn't do any of this. Nor is it
particularly a good searcher on the Gnutella network, I just eventually
found that it was coming back with zero matches, when another servant would
come back with tons of matches. That was enough for me, got rid of it.
Bearshare: simple interface, no frills, but too much advertising. I tried
this servant after Newtella -- it was a night and day difference. So I had
thought I had found the perfect servant. It was so much better than Newtella
that I didn't think anything could get any better -- I was wrong. You had
the ability to search for any kind of files not just music. The section tabs
on the interface were logically and intuitively arranged (e.g. upload,
download, connections, setup, etc.). I did get annoyed by the constant
updates that kept coming out; no sooner would you download the latest
version than the next version would already come out, and you'd get an
annoying message telling you to download that latest version which you
couldn't turn off. One thing they kept doing with the upgrades was adding
more and more commercial features to it, like advertising popup applications
that kept running in the background even when Bearshare wasn't running;
these things would at random times popup a web page with an ad for some
product in it. I didn't even know how these webpages kept popping up until I
looked in my process list and found something running in the background. I
used it upto 2.2.4 before I said the heck with this, and uninstalled it
permanently. Avoid.
Gnotella: getting better, but still buggy. No advertising on this servant, I
liked it already. It had some good features, like categorized searches, and
multi-window searches. With categorized searches you can search for
specifically such things as music files (mp3, wav, wmv, etc.), or image
files (jpg, gif, bmp, etc.), or video (mpg, mov, avi, etc.), without having
see matches from other categories. Multi-window separated searches simply
means you can have multiple searches going, and each of the searches will
report their results back into their own individual windows, not all mixed
together. In Bearshare, you didn't have this feature, all search results got
dumped into the same window and it got confusing. You have upto 3 separate
search windows. Another great feature of Gnotella is the ability to apply
personalized skins to it. Bearshare also seems to get less hits during
searches than Gnotella. However, Gnotella is still in beta, and as such you
will often find wierd bugs cropping up out of nowhere, causing application
crashes. Fortunately, the application crashes seem to take down the Gnotella
itself, and nothing else: this is a good feature for people using Windows
9x/ME, but irrelevant for people using Windows NT/2000. Because of the
bugginess, I had to give up using it, but I'd go back to it again without
hesitation as they stabilize the code.
Limewire: Java interface, very pretty, and pretty stable. This is the most
unique Gnutella servant implementation, it is programmed in Java rather than
in a Windows-native compiler. You'll notice the unique Java look and feel
right away, if you've used a lot of Java applets in the past. The best
looking Gnutella servant of them all. Offers a lot of good features, such as
categorized and multi-window searches, just like Gnotella; actually it goes
one better than Gnotella as it allows you to have more than three searches
going simultaneously, each one in its own window. One annoying thing about
it is that because it is a Java application, there is a bit of separation
between this and any other Windows applications you might be running; for
example, you won't be able to cut and paste text from an Internet Exploder
webpage and this applet; also, I noticed that my scroll mouse's scroll wheel
doesn't work inside this applet, you have to use the traditional up and down
arrows on the scrollbar; again, this is likely because of the fact that it
is a Java applet and it runs in its own virtual machine separate from the
rest of Windows -- what the underlying Java virtual machine won't support,
this application won't support either. Also sometimes the Java virtual
machine may crash if you run it too long: this is an issue for the people
who write the virtual machine, not the applet itself.
Gnucleus: not pretty, but a workhorse that gets the job done. This one
offers multi-window separated searches, but not categorized searches. This
also seems to offer the best network connections of them all; for some
reason the searches return the highest hit rates, and it seems to connect to
its peers very quickly compared to all of the others. As soon as I connect
to the network with this program, I often see that there are people already
beginning to download from me within seconds. As such, this is the ideal
servant for a pure upload server; you can leave this program running, go off
to work and people can sponge files off you to their hearts content while
you're gone. It even offers some server-oriented speed filter features not
available on any other servant. For example, if you have a DSL or cable
connection, and you don't want some 56K modem user trying to download
multimedia files that will take several hours to download, you can set
minimum speed limits. This servant was programmed under the Gnu GPL license,
so we can only imagine that it will be the basis of better and better
features in the future as the Gnu community works on it en masse.
Just some final notes about all of the clients. Some of the clients can do
recursive directory searches, i.e. they can search through subdirectories
for files, while others can't. Newtella and Bearshare can't, everything else
can. Gnucleus can even include subdirectory path names in the search
criterion.
Overall, I'd suggest that Gnotella and Limewire are the best overall
servants, with Limewire coming out on top for stability. Gnucleus is the
best servant as a server. Bearshare, if you're okay with the advertisements,
you can go for it. Avoid Newtella.
[my comment- still reading -- |
