> LMStudio is not open source though, ollama is

and why should that affect usage? it's not like ollama users fork the repo before installing it.

I suspect Ollama is at least partly moving away open source as they look to raise capitol, when they released their replacement desktop app they did so as closed source. You're absolutely right that people should be using llama.cpp - not only is it truly open source but it's significantly faster, has better model support, many more features, better maintained and the development community is far more active.

> but people should use llama.cpp instead

MLX is a lot more performant than Ollama and llama.cpp on Apple Silicon, comparing both peak memory usage + tok/s output.

edit: LM Studio benefits from MLX optimizations when running MLX compatible models.

Besides optimizations specific to running locally lands in lamma.cpp first.

Ollama did not open source their GUI.

ik_llama is almost always faster when tuned. However, when untuned I've found them to be very similar in performance with varied results as to which will perform better.

But vLLM and Sglang tend to be faster than both of those.

Note that there's also "LlamaBarn" (macOS app): https://github.com/ggml-org/LlamaBarn