Discussion

Friends Don't Let Friends Use Ollama

speedgoose: I prefer Ollama over the suggested alternatives.I will switch once we have good user experience on simple features.A new model is released on HF or the Ollama registry? One `ollama pull` and it's available. It's underwhelming? `ollama rm`.

yokoprime: i had no idea about all this. especially the performance and bugs. thanks for informing me!

Zetaphor: I got tired of repeating the same points and having to dig up sources every time, so here's the timeline (as I know it) in one place with sources.

kelsolaar: Great writing, thanks for the summary and timeline.

dackdel: i use goose by block

robot-wrangler: Thanks, did not know any of this.

tyfon: I think the biggest advantage for me with ollama is the ability to "hotswap" models with different utility instead of restarting the server with different models combined with the simple "ollama pull model". In other words, it has been quite convenient.Due to this post I had to search a bit and it seems that llama.cpp recently got router support[1], so I need to have a look at this.My main use for this is a discord bot where I have different models for different features like replying to messages with images/video or pure text, and non reply generation of sentiment and image descriptions. These all perform best with different models and it has been very convenient for the server to just swap in and out models on request.[1] https://huggingface.co/blog/ggml-org/model-management-in-lla...

segmondy: You can do that with llama-server

usernomdeguerre: Do they still not let you change the default model folder? You had to go through this whole song and dance to manually register a model via a pointless dockerfile wannabe that then seemed to copy the original model into their hash storage (again, unable to change where that storage lived).At the time I dropped it for LMStudio, which to be fair was not fully open source either, but at least exposed the model folder and integrated with HF rather than a proprietary model garden for no good reason.

andreidbr: This also annoyed me a lot. I was running it before upgrading the SSD storage and I wanted to compare with LM Studio. Figured it would be good to have both interfaces use the same models downloaded from HF.Had to go down the same rabbit hole of finding where things are, how they're sorted/separated/etc. It was unnecessarily painful

dnnddidiej: On a practical note if fumbles connection handling as to be unusable to download anything.

majorchord: > the ability to "hotswap" models with different utility instead of restarting the serverThe article mentions llama-swap does this

0xbadcafebee: [delayed]

utopiah: Not sure why VLC doesn't do that.It's a joke... but also not really? I mean VLC is "just" an interface to play videos. Videos are content files one "interact" with, mostly play/pause and few other functions like seeking. Because there are different video formats VLC relies on codecs to decode the videos, so basically delegating the "hard" part to codecs.Now... what's the difference here? A model is a codec, the interactions are sending text/image/etc to it, output is text/image/etc out. It's not even radically bigger in size as videos can be huge, like models.I'm confused as why this isn't a solved problem, especially (and yes I'm being a big sarcastic here, can't help myself) in a time where "AI" supposedly made all smart wise developers who rely on it 10x or even 1000x more productive.Weird.

osmsucks: I noticed the performance issues too. I started using Jan recently and tried running the same model via llama.cpp vs local ollama, and the llama.cpp one was noticeably faster.

brabel: Thanks for writing this, I hope people here will actually read this and not assume this is some unfounded hit piece. I was involved a little bit in llama.cpp and knew most of what you wrote and it’s just disgusting how ollama founders behaved! For people looking for alternatives, I would also recommend llama-file, it’s a one file executable for any OS that includes your chosen model: https://github.com/mozilla-ai/llamafile?tab=readme-ov-fileIt’s truly open source, backed by Mozilla, openly uses llama.cpp and was created by wizard Justine Tunney of CosmopolitanC fame.

sudb: seems pretty unrelated to the post?also you might be the only person in the wild I've seen admit to this

TomGarden: The performance issues are crazy. Thanks for sharing this

pheggs: you can pull directly from huggingface with llama.cpp, and it also has a decent web chat included

sudb: What problem is it that you are confused isn't solved?I think the codec analogy is neat but isn't the codec here llama.cpp, and the models are content files? Then the equivalent of VLC are things like LMStudio etc. which use llama.cpp to let you run models locally?I'd guess one reason we haven't solved the "codec" layer is that there doesn't seem to be a standard that open model trainers have converged on yet?

arcza: I find the style of writing incredibly annoying (it doesn't make the point, full of hyperbole) and the website has the standard slopsite black background and glowing CSS.

AndroTux: Exactly. The blog post states that the alternatives listed are similarly intuitive. They are not. If you just need a chat app, then sure, there’s plenty of options. But if you want an OpenAI compatible API with model management, accessibility breaks down fast.I’m open to suggestions, but the alternatives outlined in the blog post ain’t it.

Mario9382: Really nice. I wasn't aware of any of this.

cientifico: For most users that wanted to run LLM locally, ollama solved the UX problem.One command, and you are running the models even with the rocm drivers without knowing.If llama provides such UX, they failed terrible at communicating that. Starting with the name. Llama.cpp: that's a cpp library! Ollama is the wrapper. That's the mental model. I don't want to build my own program! I just want to have fun :-P

anakaine: Llama.cpp now has a gui installed by default. It previously lacked this. Times have changed.

OtherShrezzing: While that might be true, for as long as its name is “.cpp”, people are going to think it’s a C++ library and avoid it.

mentalgear: > Ollama is a Y Combinator-backed (W21) startup, founded by engineers who previously built a Docker GUI that was acquired by Docker Inc. The playbook is familiar: wrap an existing open-source project in a user-friendly interface, build a user base, raise money, then figure out monetization. The progression follows the pattern cleanly: 1. Launch on open source, build on llama.cpp, gain community trust 2. Minimize attribution, make the product look self-sufficient to investors 3. Create lock-in, proprietary model registry format, hashed filenames that don’t work with other tools 4. Launch closed-source components, the GUI app 5. Add cloud services, the monetization vector

speedgoose: Does it have a model registry with an API and hot swapping or you still have to use sometime like llama swap as suggested in the article ? Or is it CLI?

dminik: You can have multiple models served now with loading/unloading with just the server binary.https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/tools/serv...

hacker_homie: Llama.cpp added the ability load/switch models on demand with the max-models and models preset flags.

dhruv3006: ollama is pretty intuitive to use still - dont see why will stop.

goodpoint: The missing attribution pattern is nasty.

mijoharas: Frankly I think the cli UX and documentation is still much better for ollama.It makes a bunch of decisions for you so you don't have to think much to get a model up and running.

nikodunk: Having read above article, I just gave llama.cpp a shot. It is as easy as the author says now, though definitely not documented quite as well. Niko's quickstart:brew install llama.cppllama-server -hf ggml-org/gemma-4-E4B-it-GGUF --port 8000Go to localhost:8000 for the Web UI. On Linux it accelerates correctly on my AMD GPU, which Ollama failed to do, though of course everyone's mileage seems to vary on this.

BrissyCoder: > No mention of the fact that Ollama is about 1000x easier to use.Easier than what?I came across LM Studio (mentioned in the post) about 3 years ago before I even knew what Ollama as. It was far better even then.

throw9393rj: I spend like 2 hours trying to get vulkan acceleration working with ollama, no luck (half models are not supported and crash it). With llama.cpp podman container starts and works in 5 minutes.

paganel: Another scummy YCombinator project, one of many lately. Looks like no-one is left at the wheel, at least as long as the valuations (and hence money) keep coming in.

DeathArrow: I see no mention of vLLM in the article.

FrozenSynapse: but if ollama is much slower, that's cutting on your fun and you'll be having better fun with a faster GUI

kennywinker: > This creates a recurring pattern on r/LocalLLaMA: new model launches, people try it through Ollama, it’s broken or slow or has botched chat templates, and the model gets blamed instead of the runtime.Seems like maybe, at least some of the time, you’re being underwhelmed my ollama not the model.The better performance point alone seems worth switching away

speedgoose: I follow the llama.cpp runtime improvements and it’s also true for this project. They may rush a bit less but you also have to wait for a few days after a model release to get a working runtime with most features.

Maxious: Model authors are welcome to add support to llama.cpp before release like IBM did for granite 4 https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/13550

san_tekart: The CLI is great locally, but the architecture fights you in production. Putting a stateful daemon that manages its own blob storage inside a container is a classic anti-pattern. I ended up moving to a proper stateless binary like llama-server for k8s.

cachius: I also thought llamafile deserves a mention. Once you have all model params and tunings done bakes 'em into a single portable binary!

figassis: This is correct, and I avoided it for this reason, did not have the bandwidth to get into any cpp rabbit hole so just used whatever seemed to abstract it away.

thot_experiment: I was pretty big on ollama, it seemed like a great default solution. I had alpha that it was a trash organization but I didn't listen because I just liked having a reliable inference backend that didn't require me to install torch. I switched to llama.cpp for everything maybe 6 months ago because of how fucking frustrating every one of my interactions with ollama (the organization) were. I wanna publicly apologize to everyone who's concerns I brushed off. Ollama is a vampire on the culture and their demise cannot come soon enough.FWIW llama.cpp does almost everything ollama does better than ollama with the exception of model management, but like, be real, you can just ask it to write an API of your preferred shape and qwen will handle it without issue.

denismi: Hmm.. pacman -Ss ollama | wc -l 16 pacman -Ss llama.cpp | wc -l 0 pacman -Ss lmstudio | wc -l 0 Maybe some day.

NamlchakKhandro: LM Studio is 1000x easier to use than ollama btw

NamlchakKhandro: drop ollama in the bin, no one needs it.

Havoc: Alas people want convenience and don’t care about this sort of stuff.

eterm: This is the first I'm learning that it isn't just a C++ library.In fact the first line of the wikipedia article is:> llama.cpp is an open source software library

RobotToaster: It would make sense to just make the GUI a separate project, they could call it llama.gui.