A good software to start is LM Studio [1]. Another popular alternative is Ollama [2].

A better software when you're used to it all is llama.cpp as it's usually a bit faster and more frequently updated [3].

A good place to get models is HuggingFace, particularly the Unsloth models [4]

Most popular models lately to run on "regular" gaming PC's, workstations, Macs etc are: Qwen 3.5 9b, Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B, Qwen 3.6 27B, Gemma 4.

But there are hundreds or thousands of other models and different quantizations, finetunes, etc, etc. Have fun :)

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/

[1] https://lmstudio.ai/

[2] https://ollama.com/

[3] https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp

[4] https://huggingface.co/unsloth/collections