Best Download Manager For Linux

Those who switched to Linux from Windows mostly have this question: “What is the alternative for IDM in Linux?”. I accept the truth that Internet Download Manager is hard to replace in terms of rich set of features but there are download managers available for Linux which are capable enough to satisfy the IDM fanboys. This article introduces the best download manager I have ever seen for Linux; the uGet Download Manager.

What makes uGet the best?

Download acceleration: I have tested uGet with aria2 and Xtreme Download Manager and both provides same download speed. (uGet: 1707 KB/Sec & XDM: 1.7 MB/Sec). Download acceleration is achieved by multiple connections to the server using several threads in the application. However, simply increasing the number of threads (in other words, parallel connections to the server) doesn't mean that you can achieve infinite speed. When number of threads exceed the number of cores in the CPU, the performance will not increase further. Therefore, I strongly believe that both uGet and XDM provides the best of the available acceleration and which must be equal to IDM.

I have used uGet, IDM, XDM, FlareGet, JDownloader and even more… but I have noticed that only the IDM and uGet(with aria2) utilizes the complete bandwidth to accelerate the download. I came to this conclusion because when they download a large file, the browser struggles to load any websites. Either I have to limit their download speed or wait until the download completes in order to browse the Internet :-)

Free and Open Source: Who wants to pay for a software while a FOSS provides the same or even better solution?

Integration with browsers: Google Chrome is my favorite browser and also I use Firefox. uGet integrates well with Firefox through FlashGot extension and the gap for Google Chrome was not filled until yesterday. Yes! now uGet Download Manager integrates with Google Chrome and any Chromium based browsers including Vivaldi.

Integrate uGet with Google Chrome, Chromium and Vivaldi:

For more details: uget-chrome-wrapper

Integrate uGet with Firefox

Even more:

• Downloads Queue
• Pause and Resume Downloads
• Download Categories
• Clipboard Monitor
• Batch Downloads
• Multi-Protocol
• Scheduler
• Computer Shutdown After Completion
• Download speed limit

What are the features that I miss?

• Dialog on download complete to open file/folder
• In depth link grabber

How to install?

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:plushuang-tw/uget-stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install uget
sudo apt install aria2

Goto Settings → Plug-in and select aria2 as the plugin

For more details and for other distributions: uGet Downloads