I wasn't aware of the politics behind Ollama but I have noticed the lack of variety in quant versions, the lag between availability on Ollama, and their push to get you to use their cloud versions.
I don't use local models often enough, but this convinced me to uninstall ollama. Now I need to figure out which of the options at the end of that post is the best alternative for me.
For those new to llama.cpp, the llama-server component running in "router mode" is fantastic; you place your common configuration in a defaults section of an ini file, and then model specific configuration in separate sections of the ini file. You can switch between models, on the fly, using the API, and the built-in web front-end for llama-server supports model switching as a drop down menu. Llama-server can just always be running, in the background (you can set an idle time for it to automatically unload weights to free vram/ram, and a maximum simultaneously running model count which will evict models on an LRU basis before loading new ones, if the count is exceeded).
llama-bench is another great tool included in llama.cpp, where you can provide ranges of options to test, and just let it run through all the variations that you requested, then take the best performing and add those settings to the ini file above.
There are a lot of optional tunables that can really improve performance with llama-server. E.g., typical average tok/sec generation speed improved over 7X for Gemma4 31B, on my laptop, with tuned batch-size / ubatch-size and enabling both spec-type draft-mtp and ngram-mod (with some custom settings on both). I.e., even though you don't need to do this for llama-server to be useful, it can be worth your while to spend a little time optimizing settings for your favorite models especially if your hardware is marginal.
This article is really helpful for finding alternatives. I was already using LMStudio but I love that I now know about a couple of true open source alternatives I can try out.
Came here to post an anti-ollama rant, real glad this is already the top comment. Nature is healing.
It's not my favorite but we do have to be aggressive in fighting these gross attempts for vc-backed silicon valley non-contributors to exploit open source labor.
I see a lot of these "don't use [insert product]" posts and it's normally always BS about how some exec at the company has the wrong political views or upset some community who was the product by taking it in a different direction from what they wanted.
I think this is probably first time ever I read one of these and was convinced immediately that I should probably look into using something else.
Or, you know. Don't tell me what to do. One dirty hand washes another and many of llama.cpp's new features are straight copies of ollama functionality. You do you of course. But stop denying them their contribution to this ecosystem and stop denying me my agency to salve your politics.
>The project’s binary distributions didn’t include the required MIT license notice for the llama.cpp code they were shipping. This isn’t a matter of open-source etiquette, the MIT license has exactly one major requirement: include the copyright notice. Ollama didn’t.
I'm going to uninstall Ollama.