[h14h]

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.