Though I use Transmission on my NAS4Free box, which I control remotely through the excellent transgui program (https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui) I also install qBittorrent to all Windows/Linux users asking for a client for it being very stable and consistent among platforms, the latter very important for newbies, but I see now they're porting Transmission to Windows as well. Good!
I don't consider closed source clients for security reasons, or bloated ones (Vuze etc.) because I'd rather use a spare GB of RAM to make a filesystem more snappy than to load a Java environment that eats alone half the resources of a small server.
Last I heard, Deluge was the preferred minimalist client. I've never noticed much difference between the ones I've tried other than that some have ads. Performance seems to be pretty much the same across the board.
I wouldn't called Deluge minimalist - that's Transmission.
Deluge is more of a power-tool, albeit one most people can use happily.
The big thing that I like is that you can use the desktop GUI (GTK) client with a remote daemon doing the actual downloading. Plenty of them have web-clients (Deluge does as well), but it's nice using the proper GUI. Other than that, it has all of the usual tools you'd want from a client.
That's a very disingenuous phrasing. They were hacked. Maybe (probably) due to bad security practices, but they didn't intentionally distribute malware.
I don't consider closed source clients for security reasons, or bloated ones (Vuze etc.) because I'd rather use a spare GB of RAM to make a filesystem more snappy than to load a Java environment that eats alone half the resources of a small server.