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LM Studio has been around longer. I’ve used it since three years ago. I’d also agree it is generally a better beginner choice then and now.

Unsloth Studio is more featureful (well integrated tool calling, web search, and code execution being headline features), and comes from the people consistently making some of the best GGUF quants of all popular models. It also is well documented, easy to setup, and also has good fine-tuning support.

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LM Studio isn't free/libre/open source software, which misses the point of using open weights and open source LLMs in the first place.
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Disagree, there are a lot of reasons to use open source local LLMs that aren't related to free/libre/oss principles. Privacy being a major one.
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If you care about privacy making sure the closed source software does not call home is a concern...
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I run Little Snitch[1] on my Mac, and I haven't seen LM Studio make any calls that I feel like it shouldn't be making.

Point it to a local models folder, and you can firewall the entire app if you feel like it.

Digressing, but the issue with open source software is that most OSS software don't understand UX. UX requires a strong hand and opinionated decision making on whether or not something belongs front-and-center and it's something that developers struggle with. The only counterexample I can think of is Blender and it's a rare exception and sadly not the norm.

LM Studio manages the backend well, hides its complexities and serves as a good front-end for downloading/managing models. Since I download the models to a shared common location, If I don't want to deal with the LM Studio UX, I then easily use the downloaded models with direct llama.cpp, llama-swap and mlx_lm calls.

[1]: https://obdev.at

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