| ▲ | April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini(gist.github.com) |
| 45 points by greenstevester 2 hours ago | 17 comments |
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| ▲ | redrove 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| There is virtually no reason to use Ollama over LM Studio or the myriad of other alternatives. Ollama is slower and they started out as a shameless llama.cpp ripoff without giving credit and now they “ported” it to Go which means they’re just vibe code translating llama.cpp, bugs included. |
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| ▲ | faitswulff 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Does LM Studio have an equivalent to the ollama launch command? i.e. `ollama launch claude --model qwen3.5:35b-a3b-coding-nvfp4` | |
| ▲ | alifeinbinary an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I really like LM Studio when I can use it under Windows but for people like me with Intel Macs + AMD gpu ollama is the only option because it can leverage the gpu using MoltenVK aka Vulkan, unofficially. We're still testing it, hoping to get the Vulkan support in the main branch soon. It works perfectly for single GPUs but some edge cases when using multiple GPUs are unsupported until upstream support from MoltenVK comes through. But yeah, I agree, it wasn't cool to repackage Georgi's work like that. | |
| ▲ | meltyness 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I feel like the READMEs for these 3 large popular packages already illustrate tradeoffs better than hacker news argument | |
| ▲ | lousken an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | lm studio is not opensource and you can't use it on the server and connect clients to it? | | | |
| ▲ | gen6acd60af 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | LM Studio is closed source. And didn't Ollama independently ship a vision pipeline for some multimodal models months before llama.cpp supported it? | |
| ▲ | iLoveOncall an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > There is virtually no reason to use Ollama over LM Studio or the myriad of other alternatives. Hmm, the fact that Ollama is open-source, can run in Docker, etc.? |
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| ▲ | robotswantdata an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why are you using Ollama? Just use llama.cpp brew install llama.cpp use the inbuilt CLI, Server or Chat interface. + Hook it up to any other app |
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| ▲ | boutell 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Last night I had to install the VO.20 pre-release of ollama to use this model. So I'm wondering if these instructions are accurate. |
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| ▲ | easygenes an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why is ollama so many people’s go-to? Genuinely curious, I’ve tried it but it feels overly stripped down / dumbed down vs nearly everything else I’ve used. Lately I’ve been playing with Unsloth Studio and think that’s probably a much better “give it to a beginner” default. |
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| ▲ | diflartle 8 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Ollama is good enough to dabble with, and getting a model is as easy as ollama pull <model name> vs figuring it out by yourself on hugging face and trying to make sense on all the goofy letters and numbers between the forty different names of models, and not needing a hugging face account to download. So you start there and eventually you want to get off the happy path, then you need to learn more about the server and it's all so much more complicated than just using ollama. You just want to try models, not learn the intricacies of hosting LLMs. | |
| ▲ | polotics an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ollama got some first-mover advantage at the time when actually building and git pulling llama.cpp was a bit of a moat. The devs' docker past probably made them overestimate how much they could lay claim to mindshare. However, no one really could have known how quickly things would evolve... Now I mostly recommend LM-studio to people. What does unsloth-studio bring on top? | | |
| ▲ | easygenes an hour ago | parent [-] | | LM Studio has been around longer. I’ve used it since three years ago. I’d also agree it is generally a better beginner choice then and now. Unsloth Studio is more featureful (well integrated tool calling, web search, and code execution being headline features), and comes from the people consistently making some of the best GGUF quants of all popular models. It also is well documented, easy to setup, and also has good fine-tuning support. |
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| ▲ | greenstevester 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Right. So Google released Gemma 4, a 26B mixture-of-experts model that only activates 4B parameters per token. It's essentially a model that's learned to do the absolute minimum amount of work while still getting paid. I respect that enormously. It scores 1441 on Arena Elo — roughly the same as Qwen 3.5 at 397B and Kimi k2.5 at 1100B. Ollama v0.19 switched to Apple's MLX framework on Apple Silicon. 93% faster decode. They've also improved caching so your coding agents don't have to re-read the entire prompt every time, about time I'd say. The gist covers the full setup: install, auto-start on boot, keep the model warm in memory. It runs on a 24GB Mac mini, which means the most expensive part of your local AI setup is still the desk you put it on. |
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| ▲ | krzyk 19 minutes ago | parent [-] | | By desk you mean that "Mac mini"? Because it is pricey. In my country it is 1000 USD (from Apple for basic M4 with 24GB). My desk was 1/5th of that price. And considering that this Mac mini won't be doing anything else is there a reason why not just buy subscription from Claude, OpenAI, Google, etc.? Are those open models more performant compared to Sonnet 4.5/4.6? Or have at least bigger context? |
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