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by ribosometronome 19 days ago
That workflow has been around for awhile now. I'm sure there are others but LM Studio has a model browser in app that effectively simplifies things to hitting download and hitting launch. The complexity tends to be in that there's a lot of models to choose from and also knowing how to set up whatever tool you're using with a local model. None of it's particularly hard, unless you start trying to customize settings.

I think the bigger hang up is that they're still slower and less capable than the frontier models, especially at the hardware specs most home users are likely to have.
2 comments
h14h 18 days ago
The performance hangup is definitely a barrier, but I think LM Studio and other similar apps are still too far on the "techy" end of the spectrum and have UX barriers that will need to be addressed. IMO for most people, exposing things even as "basic" as the official model name is a leaky abstraction that could be overwhelming.

If the first thing (for example) my mom sees upon installing the app is a dropdown model picker that contains things like "Qwen3.6-35b-a3b-mlx" she will 100% be bouncing off of it.

IMO the best version of this is a custom app/harness with a couple of pre-selected (and ideally fine-tuned) open models that immediately start downloading after checking the system's hardware specs. This would likely be a turn-off to most devs, but is absolutely essential if building an app for general consumers.

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selicos 19 days ago
LM Studio Link is brilliant, outside their central login/auth requirement. Tailscale is the backbone, I think, so it makes sense but I'm sure a method with wireguard could exist and enable similar performance.

the current dielmma for me is how do I install a model on a remote LM Studio device without bypassing Lm Studio to SSH or remote in?

> lms link [servername] get model ?

> lms get [servername] model ?

> lms get model --link [servername] ?

Maybe I need to read the docs again but I swear the only way is remote or go to that device and download via the GUI, ssh in and use the local cli.

Maybe can copy/paste from one device's downloads dir to the server? Maybe I need to try hosting models on my NAS and see if I can download from device 1 then run on device 2 without install/setup?

link