How is it a pain exactly? It’s just learning and only takes a day or two to get up to speed. We seem to have forgotten that for the past fifty years doing all kinds of tasks on computers has been tedious and involved and time consuming to even get working. My first computer had 48kb of RAM and to play a game you had to load it off cassette for five minutes. That was annoying. Having LM Studio download a model and load so you can chat or attach an agent it is effortless and easy in comparison.
replyNot to mention you can just ask Codex or Claude Code to set up a local LLM for you. Use one tool to set up the other.
replyI dunno I use LMStudio pretty regularly and the MLX folks and the community usually have MLX versions of new model releases up within a day or two.
replyFor some models like the popular coding and chat models, things move faster. For things like images, voice, sound etc they definitely lag a long way behind.
reply& they clearly delineate all the models that’ll work on your exact machine (but guardrails can be disabled in settings)
replyConverting a model to mlx is literally a git clone and mlx_lm.convert. 5 minute operation after clone.
replyOr just ask any model to do it for you.
replyCounterpoint, I'm just a happy user of this local LLM [1] from antirez (of Redis fame).
replyIn general I just don't like not using a cross platform architecture of some kind.
replyMLX is fine, but the cross platform alternatives (ONNX) are terrible, GGUF often lacks and doesn't have the "easy convert" that some of the commenters below say MLX has.