How do you run Qwen? I tried setting it up the other day and got really confused with all the options between Ollama, LM Studio, and llama.cpp and also the bazillion different Qwen models available.
- See "Llama.cpp vs Ollama"[0] and "Llama.cpp vs LM Studio"[1] for a high-level features comparison and find out which one suite you best (check out the "Target Users" category[0][1], at least).
- If you're still not sure, "LM Studio"[2] is ok to start with as you'll be able to download, start/stop/manage and chat with your LLM model all in one place: a single desktop app. Also, once installed, enable "Developer mode" under "Settings > Developer" tab; you might find it useful later.
- Regarding LLM models you can, based on your hardware spec, start with Qwen3.6, Google's Gemma4, OpenAI's gpt-oss-20b or Nvidia's Nemotron; use LM Studio's "Model Browser" screen to search for LLM models (each one listed with their organizational name/brand & logo: ignore the one you don't recognize as you might not need them at the start of your journey; you can always revisit them later, if needed.)
- Regarding which quantized LLM models you should download & run, just go with the default "LM Studio" selection (at least, in the beginning). Later, you can experiment with other quantization values to find out which one works best for your use cases.
