Makes total sense. You cannot be constrained by the CLI when do much of what models do is multimodal and graphical. I don't think this dilutes their efforts in running the models or the CLI. In fact it's a huge enhancement and helps them penetrate the enterprise market in the long term. And the reality is, when you take VC funding for an open source tool, your customer basis is going to be the enterprise and your inevitable goal is to become a profitable business. Do not let any of the delusions of Docker fool you. Build a thing, take VC money, you need to return that investment with profit. Unfortunately free things and Dev centric tooling often make it very difficult to establish that business model. So for Ollama to take this UI approach potentially let's them then monetize a lot of things around the GUI and leave the CLI tool free.
Ollama's new app
211–220 of 299 posts
Re: Ollama's new app
#212Looks like a big pivot on target audience from developers to regular users, at least on the homepage https://ollama.com/ as a product. Before, it was all about the CLI versions of Ollama for devs, now it's not even mentioned. At the bottom of the blog post it says: > For pure CLI versions of Ollama, standalone downloads are available on Ollama’s GitHub releases page. Nothing against that, just an observation. Previou…
one of the maintainers for Ollama. I don't see it as a pivot. We are all developers ourselves, and we use it. In fact, there are many self-made prototypes before this from different individuals. We were hooked, so we built it for ourselves. Ollama is made for developers, and our focus in continually improving Ollama's capabilities.
I just updated and a bit annoying by default gemma3:4b was selected that I don't have on my local. I guess would be nicer to default to one of the models that are present.
It was nice it started downloading it but also there was no indication I don't have that model before hand until I opened drop-down to see download buttons.
But of course nice job guys.
Re: Ollama's new app
#213I am somewhat surprised that this app doesn't seem to offer any way to connect to a remote Ollama instance. The most powerful computer I own isn't necessarily the one I'm running the GUI on.
You can work around this by using SSH port forwarding (ssh -L 11434:localhost:11434 user@remote) to connect to a remote Ollama instance, though native support would definitely be better.
Wait, it already connects over the network, it just doesn't let you specify the hostname? That's really surprising to me.
Re: Ollama's new app
#214I don't understand this move. A frontend desktop application is the opposite of what I and anyone else I know uses Ollama for. It's a local LLM backend. It's been around long enough now that any long term users have found, created and/or adjusted to their own front end interface. I'm comfy, but some of the cutting edge local LLMs have been a little bit slow to be available recently, maybe this frontend focus is why.…
> some of the cutting edge local LLMs have been a little bit slow to be available recently
You can pull models directily from hugging face ollama pull hf.co/google/gemma-3-27b-it
Re: Ollama's new app
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
one of the maintainers for Ollama. I don't see it as a pivot. We are all developers ourselves, and we use it. In fact, there are many self-made prototypes before this from different individuals. We were hooked, so we built it for ourselves. Ollama is made for developers, and our focus in continually improving Ollama's capabilities.
I just updated and a bit annoying by default gemma3:4b was selected that I don't have on my local. I guess would be nicer to default to one of the models that are present. It was nice it started downloading it but also there was no indication I don't have that model before hand until I opened drop-down to see download buttons. But of course nice job guys.
Thanks for the kind words. Sorry about that, we are working out some of the initial experience for Ollama.
Re: Ollama's new app
#216I am somewhat surprised that this app doesn't seem to offer any way to connect to a remote Ollama instance. The most powerful computer I own isn't necessarily the one I'm running the GUI on.
This is a feature we are looking into supporting. Thank you for reaffirming the need.
But it seems like the GUI already connects over the network, no? In that case, why do you need to do user research for adding what is basically a command line option, at its simplest? It would probably take less time to add that than to write the comment.
Re: Ollama's new app
#217I mean, nice but something like open-webui is just gazillions times better. This is just a GUI to the command line ...
Re: Ollama's new app
#218Looks like a big pivot on target audience from developers to regular users, at least on the homepage https://ollama.com/ as a product. Before, it was all about the CLI versions of Ollama for devs, now it's not even mentioned. At the bottom of the blog post it says: > For pure CLI versions of Ollama, standalone downloads are available on Ollama’s GitHub releases page. Nothing against that, just an observation. Previou…
one of the maintainers for Ollama. I don't see it as a pivot. We are all developers ourselves, and we use it. In fact, there are many self-made prototypes before this from different individuals. We were hooked, so we built it for ourselves. Ollama is made for developers, and our focus in continually improving Ollama's capabilities.
Congratulations on launching the front-end, but I don't see how it can be made for developers and not have a Linux version.
Re: Ollama's new app
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. This. A thousand times this. I hate Windows / MacOS but love their desktops. I love Linux / BSD but hate their desktops. So my most expensive most powerful workstation is always a headless Linux machine that I ssh into from a Windows or MacOS toy computer. Unfortunately most developers do not understand this. Every time I run a command in the terminal and it tries to open a browser tab without printing the URL,…
I can recommend to spend a day finding and configuring a window manager that suits your needs.
Or just display the URL in terminal. I spent 5 years of my life ricing my Linux machine to get it as I want it to be only to realise that, at least for my needs and likes, nothing matches MacOS’s DE, compositor and font rendering.
Not a bash on Linux desktop users, just my experience.
Re: Ollama's new app
#220Why not Linux? The UI looks to be some kind chrome based thingy - probably electron - should be easy to port to Linux. Also is there a link to the source?
I believe power users or developers can already use this from CLI in Linux. This new app for Windows and MacOS shows this is intended for regular users.
Not releasing anything for Linux because regular users don't use it is a great way to never have regular users on Linux.