My G+ repost of Harald's announcement of the Plasma Next ISOs got some complaints about slow downloads. When I checked the with KDE sysadmins, I got some great information.
First, torrents aren't available, since 1. that requires dedicated tracker software, which isn't needed since 2. KDE doesn't distribute many large files.
However, files available at http://files.kde.org/snapshots/ and http://download.kde.org have a Details tab, where metalinks and mirrors are listed. I knew nothing about metalinks, but we could all benefit from them when downloading large files.
PovAddict (Nicolas Alvarez) told me that he uses the commandline for them: `aria2c http://files.kde.org/snapshots/neon5-201406200837.iso.metalink` for instance. I had to install aria2c for this to work; and the file took less than 15 minutes to download.
I read man wget and it seems not to support metalinks; at least I didn't find a reference.
Bshah (Bushan Shah) tried with kget and says it works very well. He said, New Download > Paste metalink > it will ask which files to download.
He also found the nice Wikipedia page for me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalink
Thanks to bcooksley, PovAddict and bshaw for their help.
PS: Bcooksley adds, the .mirrorlist url is generally what we recommend for people to use anyway. So even if you don't point to the metalink, please use the .mirrorlist URL when posting a file hosted at download.kde.org or files.kde.org. If people forget to do that, click that Details link to get there for the hashes, lists of mirrors, and metalink files.
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