And this is just the tip of the iceberg for ollama. They’re the same kind of scammy tech bros as OpenAI.
The best setup depends on your hardware. There is no “easy button” unfortunately, quantized LLMs are just too intense and finicky to run without making some informed choices.
It also depends on what you want to do with the LLM. For example, some are too slow or bad at long context for agenic use, some quantizations are great at scripts but terrible outside that, or vice versa.
But LM Studio and Qwen 3.5 35B Q4 is probably the “easiest” flat recommendation I can make.
Or… honestly, just pay $40 for basically unlimited usage for a year from an API, then roll your own frontend.
I just meant that you have to be cognizant of what went into the quantization.
As an example, a “Q4_K_M” could be too much quantization to be usable on one model, and an inefficient waste of space on the other. Two Q4_K_Ms of the exact same model could be completely different, one totally borked. Or one particular Q4_K_M could excel in one task, but be totally useless for another, even with the exact same settings, when a slightly different sized or type of quantization would excel.
It’s a deep rabbit hole. It’s not random either; there are distinct technical reasons behind every case mentioned above.
And that’s not even at the cutting edge quantization anymore, though what’s “cutting edge” completely depends on your particular hardware and use case.
I’m trying to make this sound daunting on purpose.
Many people have really horrible experience with a default “ollama run” for this exact reason, because the defaults are terrible and the customization is critical to getting coherent, performant output.
Unquantized LLMs, on the other hand, are basically always run the same way: vllm docker image on a big server, official weights. There’s less to “go wrong” trying to squeeze it on hardware with unofficial runtimes and compressors.
I’ve been running LM Studio on Bazzite and I had to do nothing to get it working. Just go to the LM Studio website and download the .appimage for Linux. If you open it with Gear Lever it will install like an app from the app store and show up in your launcher with an icon.
From there I have just been able to download models and use them from in the app. In fact I setup a local server to connect to my IDE and have been trying out local models for coding. It’s pretty cool
I can also vouch for lmstudio. If you can get Hermes running on Linux I would suggest trying that as well. It connects to lm studio and you use Hermes to communicate with the model. Iook into it as there’s a lot to it, I’ve really been enjoying using it so far it even learns how I like to create tasks and I’ve stopped having to ask it to delegate certain tasks, it just knows to do it and to break down the tasks so my fairly context starved local model can handle it.
As for a model, the Qwen 3.6 family of models do really well. I’d suggest the Qwen 3.6 35B a3b probably Q4 depending on your hardware. It’s large, but because it’s a mixture of experts model only 3b of experts are kept on vram at any one time so it stays fast. Qwen 3.6 27b is the smarter “dense” model, but trying to stay with Q4 for quality it becomes too large for 16GB vram and for me runs at like 2 tokens per second lol
What’s the cutting edge now? Skool me…I want to try it. Can I grab one using ollama?
https://sleepingrobots.com/dreams/stop-using-ollama/
And this is just the tip of the iceberg for ollama. They’re the same kind of scammy tech bros as OpenAI.
The best setup depends on your hardware. There is no “easy button” unfortunately, quantized LLMs are just too intense and finicky to run without making some informed choices.
It also depends on what you want to do with the LLM. For example, some are too slow or bad at long context for agenic use, some quantizations are great at scripts but terrible outside that, or vice versa.
But LM Studio and Qwen 3.5 35B Q4 is probably the “easiest” flat recommendation I can make.
Or… honestly, just pay $40 for basically unlimited usage for a year from an API, then roll your own frontend.
Why are quantised LLMs harder to run than non quantised ones?
I just meant that you have to be cognizant of what went into the quantization.
As an example, a “Q4_K_M” could be too much quantization to be usable on one model, and an inefficient waste of space on the other. Two Q4_K_Ms of the exact same model could be completely different, one totally borked. Or one particular Q4_K_M could excel in one task, but be totally useless for another, even with the exact same settings, when a slightly different sized or type of quantization would excel.
It’s a deep rabbit hole. It’s not random either; there are distinct technical reasons behind every case mentioned above.
And that’s not even at the cutting edge quantization anymore, though what’s “cutting edge” completely depends on your particular hardware and use case.
I’m trying to make this sound daunting on purpose.
Many people have really horrible experience with a default “ollama run” for this exact reason, because the defaults are terrible and the customization is critical to getting coherent, performant output.
Unquantized LLMs, on the other hand, are basically always run the same way: vllm docker image on a big server, official weights. There’s less to “go wrong” trying to squeeze it on hardware with unofficial runtimes and compressors.
Well that sucks. I was really impressed as a novice to open weight LLMs with the ease of use for Ollama on Bazzite.
I’ve been running LM Studio on Bazzite and I had to do nothing to get it working. Just go to the LM Studio website and download the
.appimagefor Linux. If you open it with Gear Lever it will install like an app from the app store and show up in your launcher with an icon.From there I have just been able to download models and use them from in the app. In fact I setup a local server to connect to my IDE and have been trying out local models for coding. It’s pretty cool
Awesome! I’ll give it a try.
I can also vouch for lmstudio. If you can get Hermes running on Linux I would suggest trying that as well. It connects to lm studio and you use Hermes to communicate with the model. Iook into it as there’s a lot to it, I’ve really been enjoying using it so far it even learns how I like to create tasks and I’ve stopped having to ask it to delegate certain tasks, it just knows to do it and to break down the tasks so my fairly context starved local model can handle it.
As for a model, the Qwen 3.6 family of models do really well. I’d suggest the Qwen 3.6 35B a3b probably Q4 depending on your hardware. It’s large, but because it’s a mixture of experts model only 3b of experts are kept on vram at any one time so it stays fast. Qwen 3.6 27b is the smarter “dense” model, but trying to stay with Q4 for quality it becomes too large for 16GB vram and for me runs at like 2 tokens per second lol