alt Hacker NewsWhy 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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What I really don't get is why more people don't talk about LMStudio, I switched to it months ago and it seems like a straight upgrade.
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?
Ollama user with the opposite question -- why not? What am I missing out on? I'm using it as the backend for playing with other frontend stuff and it seems to work just fine.
And as someone running at 16gb card, I'm especially curious as to if I'm missing out on better performance?
Advertising, mostly.
Ollama's org had people flood various LLM/programming related Reddits and Discords and elsewhere, claiming it was an 'easy frontend for llama.cpp', and tricked people.
Only way to win is to uninstall it and switch to llama.cpp.
For me it's just the server. I use openwebui as interface. I don't want it all running on the same machine.
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.