I’ve just re-discovered ollama and it’s come on a long way and has reduced the very difficult task of locally hosting your own LLM (and getting it running on a GPU) to simply installing a deb! It also works for Windows and Mac, so can help everyone.

I’d like to see Lemmy become useful for specific technical sub branches instead of trying to find the best existing community which can be subjective making information difficult to find, so I created !Ollama@lemmy.world for everyone to discuss, ask questions, and help each other out with ollama!

So, please, join, subscribe and feel free to post, ask questions, post tips / projects, and help out where you can!

Thanks!

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    571·
    19 days ago

    TBH you should fold this into localllama? Or open source AI?

    I have very mixed (mostly bad) feelings on ollama. In a nutshell, they’re kinda Twitter attention grabbers that give zero credit/contribution to the underlying framework (llama.cpp). And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, they’ve made lots of controversial moves, and it seems like they’re headed for commercial enshittification.

    They’re… slimy.

    They like to pretend they’re the only way to run local LLMs and blot out any other discussion, which is why I feel kinda bad about a dedicated ollama community.

    It’s also a highly suboptimal way for most people to run LLMs, especially if you’re willing to tweak.

    I would always recommend Kobold.cpp, tabbyAPI, ik_llama.cpp, Aphrodite, LM Studio, the llama.cpp server, sglang, the AMD lemonade server, any number of backends over them. Literally anything but ollama.

    …TL;DR I don’t the the idea of focusing on ollama at the expense of other backends. Running LLMs locally should be the community, not ollama specifically.

    • The Hobbyist@lemmy.zipEnglish
      8·
      18 days ago

      Indeed, Ollama is going a shady route. https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/11016#issuecomment-2599740463

      I started playing with Ramalama (the name is a mouthful) and it works great. There is one or two more steps in the setup but I’ve achieved great performance and the project is making good use of standards (OCI, jinja, unmodified llama.cpp, from what I understand).

      Go and check it out, they are compatible with models from HF and Ollama too.

      https://github.com/containers/ramalama

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        19 days ago

        Totally depends on your hardware, and what you tend to ask it. What are you running? What do you use it for? Do you prefer speed over accuracy?

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
            5·
            19 days ago

            OK.

            Then LM Studio. With Qwen3 30B IQ4_XS, low temperature MinP sampling.

            That’s what I’m trying to say though, there is no one click solution, that’s kind of a lie. LLMs work a bajillion times better with just a little personal configuration. They are not magic boxes, they are specialized tools.

            Random example: on a Mac? Grab an MLX distillation, it’ll be way faster and better.

            Nvidia gaming PC? TabbyAPI with an exl3. Small GPU laptop? ik_llama.cpp APU? Lemonade. Raspberry Pi? That’s important to know!

            What do you ask it to do? Set timers? Look at pictures? Cooking recipes? Search the web? Look at documents? Do you need stuff faster or accurate?

            This is one reason why ollama is so suboptimal, with the other being just bad defaults (Q4_0 quants, 2048 context, no imatrix or anything outside GGUF, bad sampling last I checked, chat template errors, bugs with certain models, I can go on). A lot of people just try “ollama run” I guess, then assume local LLMs are bad when it doesn’t work right.

        • WhirlpoolBrewer@lemmings.worldEnglish
          1·
          18 days ago

          I have a MacBook 2 pro (Apple silicon) and would kind of like to replace Google’s Gemini as my go-to LLM. I think I’d like to run something like Mistral, probably. Currently I do have Ollama and some version of Mistral running, but I almost never used it as it’s on my laptop, not my phone.

          I’m not big on LLMs and if I can find an LLM that I run locally and helps me get off of using Google Search and Gimini, that could be awesome. Currently I use a combo of Firefox, Qwant, Google Search, and Gemini for my daily needs. I’m not big into the direction Firefox is headed, I’ve heard there are arguments against Qwant, and using Gemini feels like the wrong answer for my beliefs and opinions.

          I’m looking for something better without too much time being sunk into something I may only sort of like. Tall order, I know, but I figured I’d give you as much info as I can.

        • southernbeaver@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          17 days ago

          My HomeAssistant is running on Unraid but I have an old NVIDIA Quadro P5000. I really want to run a vision model so that it can describe who is at my doorbell.