I assumed lmstudio is the obvious choice after ollama. Is there a reason lmstudio is not used widely ?

LM Studio is fine. Gorgeous actually. I've found it really helpful for understanding parameters, settings, general figuring out.

But there is an incentive not to use it if you want to write an article that uses only open-source tools, because it isn't.

Yeah I’ve also been using it on macOS, my experience is that it works better with the metal API and has better performance.