Brief: Free Download Manager is a popular open source application but unfortunately it is not available for Linux yet. But your vote can help bring it to Linux.
Isn’t it a shame that the list of best download managers for Linux doesn’t include Free Download Manager?
Free Download Manager (popularly known as FDM) is a download accelerator and a bit torrent client. The first version was released in 2004 as a proprietary software but it has been released as an open source software under the GPL license since 2010.
Despite being open source, FDM is only available for Windows and macOS, and not for Linux.
If you are wondering what makes FDM so special, let me tell that FDM has over 30 different awards for being a clean freeware, and it’s available in many languages (27 to be exact), and many consider it to be a drop-dead alternative for IDM (Internet Download Manager)—a commercial download manager —if not better.
Some of the other features of FDM are:
- Supports download from HTTP and FTP sites.
- Splits a large file into parts and downloads simultaneously.
- Can choose three modes of traffic: Light, medium and heavy.
- Schedule downloads and perform a set of actions once done.
- Resume broken links if the server allows it.
- Download videos from Youtube.
- Import a list of URLs from the clipboard
- Integrates well with most browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc.
- Bittorrent support based on libtorrent.
- Drop box for file drag and drop.
Vote for FDM Linux version
The FDM developers posted a ‘features you want to see’ vote on Google forms asking the users to vote for features they would like to see next. One of those features is the long-awaited support for Linux. And despite it being a popular demand through the years, the feature is not even among the top 3.
It’s a golden opportunity to port FDM to the Linux ecosystem, many people converting to Linux from Windows miss it, and it doesn’t function 100% on Wine as many users reported.
So let’s put our effort and bring a popular software made available for Linux. Please vote for it on the Google Form link below. The option for Linux version is mentioned at number three at present.