qbittorrent has been my preferred choice for the better part of 10 years, ever since it was forked off of μTorrent (do not use μTorrent, it's loaded with spyware). It's open source, compiles on any operating system, and has fine grained tools for controlling your connection, very good for making certain your traffic stays secure. Transmission is a good alternative, less fully featured but it has a simpler interface if that's important to you.
I've been using uTorrent for years and my antivirus never detected anything. I'm going to uninstall it to be safe, but how do I check that it hasn't fucked my pc?
You just uninstall it. It doesn't embed anything in any other software. I have no idea what's in there at present but it has shipped with a crypto miner in the past. The alternatives are faster, better, and less skeezy.
Disagree with Deluge for Windows, qBitTorrent has typically worked better for me. However, the Android version of Deluze, Flud, is the best Android BitTorrent client imo.
qBitTorrent or Transmission would be my recommendation with probably pushing for most users to use qbit as it's become the standard and has the most developer eyes on it
Tixati's my favorite, but mostly because of all the pretty graphs. I think the idea is that it's supposed to be the "expert" torrent client that will show you every detail about everything, but the bittorrent protocol is simple enough that having all the extra details doesn't really let you do anything special.
But it does let you do things like automatically categorize torrents by primary tracker and give them different settings, or automatically filter out or prioritize files by pattern. General useful stuff.
Not open-source, though, if it matters to you. It was also banned from a bunch of private trackers for some inscrutable reason once 10 years ago, but I don't think that's a problem anymore.
EDIT: I'm not sure why I thought it was Windows only. Looks like it was always Windows and Linux.