Which harness (IDE) works with this if any? Can I use it for local coding right now?
April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
21–30 of 132 posts
Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
#22Why 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
For MLX I'd guess.
That also comes upstream from llama.cpp https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/4345
Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
#23[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?
Right now, open models that run on hardware that costs under $5000 can get up to around the performance of Sonnet 3.7. Maybe a bit better on certain tasks if you fine tune them for that specific task or distill some reasoning ability from Opus, but if you look at a broad range of benchmarks, that's about where they land in performance.
You can get open models that are competitive with Sonnet 4.6 on benchmarks (though some people say that they focus a bit too heavily on benchmarks, so maybe slightly weaker on real-world tasks than the benchmarks indicate), but you need >500 GiB of VRAM to run even pretty aggressive quantizations (4 bits or less), and to run them at any reasonable speed they need to be on multi-GPU setups rather than the now discontinued Mac Studio 512 GiB.
The big advantage is that you have full control, and you're not paying a $200/month subscription and still being throttled on tokens, you are guaranteed that your data is not being used to train models, and you're not financially supporting an industry that many people find questionable. Also, if you want to, you can use "abliterated" versions which strip away the censoring that labs do to cause their models to refuse to answer certain questions, or you can use fine-tunes that adapt it for various other purposes, like improving certain coding abilities, making it better for roleplay, etc.
Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
#24Why 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.
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.
Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
#25Why 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
For MLX I'd guess.
Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
#26Which harness (IDE) works with this if any? Can I use it for local coding right now?
Yes, you can use it for local coding. Most harnesses can be pointed at a local endpoint which provides an OpenAI compatible API, though I've had some trouble using recent versions of Codex with llama.cpp due to an API incompatibility (Codex uses the newer "responses" API, but in a way that llama.cpp hasn't fully supported).
I personally prefer Pi as I like the fact that it's minimalist and extensible. But some people just use Claude Code, some OpenCode, there are a ton of options out there and most of them can be used with local models.
Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
#27There 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`
I don't think it does, but llama.cpp does, and can load models off HuggingFace directly (so, not limited to ollama's unofficial model mirror like ollama is).
There is no reason to ever use ollama.
Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
LM Studio isn't free/libre/open source software, which misses the point of using open weights and open source LLMs in the first place.
Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
#29There 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.?
Ollama is quasi-open source.
In some places in the source code they claim sole ownership of the code, when it is highly derivative of that in llama.cpp (having started its life as a llama.cpp frontend). They keep it the same license, however, MIT.
There is no reason to use Ollama as an alternative to llama.cpp, just use the real thing instead.
Re: April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does LM Studio have an equivalent to the ollama launch command? i.e. `ollama launch claude --model qwen3.5:35b-a3b-coding-nvfp4`
I don't think it does, but llama.cpp does, and can load models off HuggingFace directly (so, not limited to ollama's unofficial model mirror like ollama is). There is no reason to ever use ollama.
> I don't think it does, but llama.cpp does
I just checked their docs and can't see anything like it.
Did you mistake the command to just download and load the model?