Just a small way to help people get their FOSS. What are some other projects that have torrents that would be good to seed?
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You grab the .torrent file from the source website (Mint, in this case) and it's safe
Ahh makes sense. I still direct download but I guess if I had Torrent client locally it might be nice. But 3-4GiB on direct download doesn't take long..
It's more of a way to reduce costs for the CDN, using torrents everyone contributes and they only have to send a small magnet file.
I might seed a few too then.
For many with unstable ISP connections, http downloads can get corrupted. Torrents are superior in this regard as the file gets split into blocks that each get checksummed for integrity after completion. This helps to ensure that the large iso is actually complete and won't just be garbage on an attempted install. Even if you checksum the iso from http download, you have to pull the entire thing again if it is damaged whereas the torrent would just repull the damaged blocks automatically.
Fair. That is a good usecase
It doesn't, but thousands of people all downloading 3-4GB from the same site will put more load on the site. Torrents avoid this issue by downloading little bits from lots of different peers