No mention of the fact that Ollama is about 1000x easier to use

Exactly. The blog post states that the alternatives listed are similarly intuitive. They are not. If you just need a chat app, then sure, there’s plenty of options. But if you want an OpenAI compatible API with model management, accessibility breaks down fast. I’m open to suggestions, but the alternatives outlined in the blog post ain’t it.

> No mention of the fact that Ollama is about 1000x easier to use. Easier than what? I came across LM Studio (mentioned in the post) about 3 years ago before I even knew what Ollama as. It was far better even then.

I spend like 2 hours trying to get vulkan acceleration working with ollama, no luck (half models are not supported and crash it). With llama.cpp podman container starts and works in 5 minutes.

> so llama-swap can load Just in case you haven't seen it yet, llama.cpp now has a router mode that lets you hot-swap models. I've switched over from llama-swap and have been happy with it.

>No mention of the fact that Ollama is about 1000x easier to use I remember changing the context size from the default unusable 2k to something bigger the model actually supports required creating a new model file in Ollama if you wanted the change to persist (another alternative: set an env var before running ollama; although, if you go that low-level route, why not just launch llama.cpp). How was that easier? Did they change this? I remember people complaining model X is "dumb" simply because Ollama capped the context size to a ridiculously small number by default. IMHO trying to model Ollama after Docker actually makes it harder for casual users. And power users will have it easier with llama.cpp directly

Not like it mattered much to me but llama-cpp is way lighter and 10x smaller in size. Resumable downloads seem to work better in llama-cpp. I love the inbuilt GUI. I used ollama first and honestly, llama-cpp has been a much better experience. Maybe given enough time, I would have seen the benefit of ollama but the inability to turn off updates even after users requested it extensively made me uninstall it. Postman PTSD is real.

Koboldcpp is a single executable with a GUI launcher and a built in webui. It also supports tts, stt, image gen, embeddings, music creation, and a bunch of other stuff out of the box, and can download and browse HF models from within the GUI. That's pretty easy to use.

Least friendly you’ve used makes me think you’ve been spoiled. :) Agreed ollama is a good intro but once you move beyond it starts to be a pain.