"very difficult"? Has the definition of "non-geek" changed in the last decade?
I know many people who had absolutely no trouble downloading various things - including software - from all the P2P networks that flourished around 10 years ago. Not only torrents, but eMule, Kazaa, Limewire, etc.
They also happened to easily infect themselves with various malware by doing that, but I'd consider it more evidence of how "non-geek" they were.
(But all in all, despite the risks, I definitely prefer and miss that era of open filesharing compared to the closed proprietary walled gardens that have replaced it.)
Opera browser used to have transparent BitTorrent built in to its 4MB binary (along with IRC, Newsgroups, email...). I miss the old, innovative Opera. Oh well, maybe we will learn one day when someone like Microsoft/Google shoves some kind of proprietary semi-peer-to-peer protocol in to IE/Chrome and runs all the tracking out of their respective cloud.
I know many people who had absolutely no trouble downloading various things - including software - from all the P2P networks that flourished around 10 years ago. Not only torrents, but eMule, Kazaa, Limewire, etc.
They also happened to easily infect themselves with various malware by doing that, but I'd consider it more evidence of how "non-geek" they were.
(But all in all, despite the risks, I definitely prefer and miss that era of open filesharing compared to the closed proprietary walled gardens that have replaced it.)