Comment by bsder
19 hours ago
> we are losing that battle badly despite all the software being here now and viable, entirely because UX sucks.
Yep. I'm an old time Linux sysadmin, but I am COMPLETELY baffled as to what I can or cannot run on my 32GB R9700 with 128GB main CPU memory.
If I want something Claude or Codex like what do I use that would be useful? If I want a chat system, what do I use? Images--apparently ComfyUI for setup but after that what do I do?
I don't even mind spinning up something in the cloud for a bit, but I need to know how I'm going to get data up and down without racking up massive bandwidth charges.
I'd love to do some tinkering, but the field is moving so fast and so full of charlatans that cleaning the dross out is almost impossible.
For coding, Qwen3.6-27B with MTP should fit in 32GB with almost full context length for Unsloth's 5-bit quantization. That's my preferred choice for a local coding agent on similar hardware: the quality delta compared to a MoE model is IMO worth the extra wait. (And I haven't found a model with 70B-120B parameters that works better for coding.) For general chat, maybe gpt-oss-120b? It should have more general knowledge than a 30B-class model; I've used it to suggest itineraries for trips and to review the completeness of small requests for proposals.
I don't have recommendations for images because I haven't played with those.
these days, even completely mainstream distros (Fedora here) include ollama, which leverages a wide range of hardware and range of models. (it's generally useful to install a more recent ollama, though.) there are free coding harnesses too.
ollama is just a wrapper around llama.cpp, and a pretty janky one at that. You're much better off using it directly.