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April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

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11–20 of 132 posts

Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

#11
post #3

There 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 feel like the READMEs for these 3 large popular packages already illustrate tradeoffs better than hacker news argument

Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

#12
post #9
post #3

There 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?

LM Studio can absolutely run as as server.

Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

#13
post #3

There 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 closed source.

And didn't Ollama independently ship a vision pipeline for some multimodal models months before llama.cpp supported it?

Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

#15

[flagged]

By desk you mean that "Mac mini"? Because it is pricey. In my country it is 1000 USD (from Apple for basic M4 with 24GB). My desk was 1/5th of that price.

And considering that this Mac mini won't be doing anything else is there a reason why not just buy subscription from Claude, OpenAI, Google, etc.?

Are those open models more performant compared to Sonnet 4.5/4.6? Or have at least bigger context?

Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

#17

Why 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 is good enough to dabble with, and getting a model is as easy as ollama pull 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.

Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

#18
post #3

There 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.

Does LM Studio have an equivalent to the ollama launch command? i.e. `ollama launch claude --model qwen3.5:35b-a3b-coding-nvfp4`

Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

#19
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lm studio is not opensource and you can't use it on the server and connect clients to it?

LM Studio can absolutely run as as server.

IIRC it does so as default too. I have loads of stuff pointing at LM Studio on localhost

Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

#20
In case someone would like to know what these are like on this hardware, I tested Gemma 4 32b (the ~20 GB model, the largest Gemma model Google published) and Gemma 4 gemma4:e4b (the ~10 GB model) on this exact setup (Mac Mini M4 with 24 GB of RAM using Ollama), I livestreamed it:

https://www.youtube.com/live/G5OVcKO70ns

The ~10 GB model is super speedy, loading in a few seconds and giving responses almost instantly. If you just want to see its performance, it says hello around the 2 minute mark in the video (and fast!) and the ~20 GB model says hello around 5 minutes 45 seconds in the video. You can see the difference in their loading times and speed, which is a substantial difference. I also had each of them complete a difficult coding task, they both got it correct but the 20 GB model was much slower. It's a bit too slow to use on this setup day to day, plus it would take almost all the memory. The 10 GB model could fit comfortably on a Mac Mini 24 GB with plenty of RAM left for everything else, and it seems like you can use it for small-size useful coding tasks.

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