qBittorrent, the popular free open-source Qt based BitTorrent client, released version 5.0.3 along with 5.1.0 Beta one day ago on Tuesday.

Changlog for the new 5.1.0 Beta so far is not available. But for version 5.0.3, it’s a maintenance release that includes primarily bug-fixes, improvements, and translation updates.

Since libtorrent alerts are handled asynchronously, there can be obsolete “state update” event reached here after torrent was reloaded in libtorrent. In the new release, it just discards such events. And, this change fixed potential app crash when changing locations of multiple torrents.

In Windows, qBittorrent does not read the correct .lnk file size (neither the shortcut file as-is, nor the target it points to) when creating torrents. So developer made change to NOT follow (meaning exclude) symlinks when creating torrents on Windows. But, it still follow symlinks on non-Windows operating systems as they don’t have such issue.

For Web UI, qBittorrent fixed reloading page after login, as well as an issue that it was unable to remove trackers with | in their URLs.

Other changes in qBittorrent 5.0.3 include:

• Fix incorrect SQL column definition
• RSS: Don’t add duplicate episodes to previously matched
• RSS: Use cached current time when parsing RSS feed
• Avoid redundant requests of announce entries from libtorrent
• Update Italian translation.

Get qBittorrent 5.0.3

The software website provides the source tarball, as well as Linux, Windows, and macOS packages available to download via the link below:

For Linux, it’s a non-install portable AppImage. Just add executable permission from file properties dialog, then user can click run it to launch the torrent client. Though, Ubuntu 22.04 and higher needs to enable AppImage support by installing libfuse2 package.

For choice, qBittorrent 5.0.3 is also available in its official PPA for Ubuntu 24.10. The PPA however no longer support 24.04 and earlier because they don’t match minimum Qt6 requirement.

To add the PPA and install qBittorrent in Ubuntu, use commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:qbittorrent-team/qbittorrent-stable

sudo apt update

sudo apt install qbittorrent qbittorrent-nox

For Ubuntu 24.04 and older, as well as most other Linux, this client is also available as Flatpak package, though it runs in sandbox environment.

Just follow the setup guide to enable flatpak support, while Debian/Ubuntu users can run the single command below in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):

sudo apt install flatpak

Then, use the command below will install the Flatpak package into your system:

flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.qbittorrent.qBittorrent.flatpakref

If you’re first time installing a Flatpak app package, then there will be lots of downloads for runtime libraries, and you need a log out and back in to make app icon visible.

Uninstall qBittorrent

Depends on which package you installed, uninstall the PPA package by running command in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):

sudo apt remove --autoremove qbittorrent qbittorrent-nox

Then you may also remove the PPA repository from your system via command:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:qbittorrent-team/qbittorrent-stable

To remove the Flatpak package, simply run command:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data org.qbittorrent.qBittorrent

Also run flatpak uninstall --unused to remove useless run-time libraries.