April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
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Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
#2[flagged]
Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
#3There is virtually no reason to use Ollama over LM Studio or the myriad of other alternatives.
Ollama is slower and they started out as a shameless llama.cpp ripoff without giving credit and now they “ported” it to Go which means they’re just vibe code translating llama.cpp, bugs included.
Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
#4There is virtually no reason to use Ollama over LM Studio or the myriad of other alternatives. Ollama is slower and they started out as a shameless llama.cpp ripoff without giving credit and now they “ported” it to Go which means they’re just vibe code translating llama.cpp, bugs included.
> There is virtually no reason to use Ollama over LM Studio or the myriad of other alternatives.
Hmm, the fact that Ollama is open-source, can run in Docker, etc.?
Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
#5Why 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.
Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
#6Why are you using Ollama? Just use llama.cpp
brew install llama.cpp
use the inbuilt CLI, Server or Chat interface. + Hook it up to any other app
Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
#7There is virtually no reason to use Ollama over LM Studio or the myriad of other alternatives. Ollama is slower and they started out as a shameless llama.cpp ripoff without giving credit and now they “ported” it to Go which means they’re just vibe code translating llama.cpp, bugs included.
I really like LM Studio when I can use it under Windows but for people like me with Intel Macs + AMD gpu ollama is the only option because it can leverage the gpu using MoltenVK aka Vulkan, unofficially. We're still testing it, hoping to get the Vulkan support in the main branch soon. It works perfectly for single GPUs but some edge cases when using multiple GPUs are unsupported until upstream support from MoltenVK comes through. But yeah, I agree, it wasn't cool to repackage Georgi's work like that.
Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
#8Why 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.
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?
Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
#9There is virtually no reason to use Ollama over LM Studio or the myriad of other alternatives. Ollama is slower and they started out as a shameless llama.cpp ripoff without giving credit and now they “ported” it to Go which means they’re just vibe code translating llama.cpp, bugs included.
lm studio is not opensource and you can't use it on the server and connect clients to it?
Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
#10Why 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.
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?
LM Studio has been around longer. I’ve used it since three years ago. I’d also agree it is generally a better beginner choice then and now.
Unsloth Studio is more featureful (well integrated tool calling, web search, and code execution being headline features), and comes from the people consistently making some of the best GGUF quants of all popular models. It also is well documented, easy to setup, and also has good fine-tuning support.