Local AI guides
Practical, tested steps. Checked against the official docs, updated as models change.
How to install Ollama on Windows (2026)
Install Ollama on Windows 10 or 11, run your first local model, check it's using your GPU, and move models to another drive.
How to install Ollama on Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch)
One-line install, NVIDIA and AMD GPU setup, running Ollama as a systemd service, and exposing it on your network safely.
How to install Ollama on a Mac (Apple Silicon)
Install Ollama on macOS, pick models that fit your unified memory, and know where files live.
LM Studio vs Ollama: which should you use? (2026)
An honest comparison of the two most popular local AI apps: interface, licence, Mac MLX support, headless servers and integrations.
VRAM and quantisation explained: what actually fits on your GPU
Why a 9B model fits in 8GB, what Q4_K_M means, how context length eats memory, and why bandwidth sets your speed.
Best local AI models for an 8GB GPU (2026)
The Ollama models that fit fully on an 8GB card like the RTX 4060, RTX 5060 or RX 7600, by use case, with exact tags.
Best local AI models for a 12GB GPU (2026)
What runs on an RTX 3060 12GB, RTX 5070 or Arc B580: the best 9B-14B Ollama models by use case.
Best local AI models for a 16GB GPU (2026)
16GB cards like the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and RX 9070 XT unlock 20-24B models: gpt-oss 20B, Mistral Small 3.2, Devstral Small 2.
Best local AI models for a 24GB GPU (2026)
RTX 3090, 4090 or RX 7900 XTX? Here are the best 27-35B Ollama models that run fully on 24GB, from Qwen3.6 to Gemma 4 31B.
Set up a free local coding assistant (Continue, VS Code, Cursor)
Use Ollama models for chat, edits and tab autocomplete in VS Code with Continue, plus the honest truth about local models in Cursor.
Chat with your documents locally: a simple RAG setup with Ollama
Build private document Q&A with Ollama: no-code options (Open WebUI, LM Studio) and a 40-line Python version you can understand.
Running local AI on AMD, Intel Arc and mini PCs
Which AMD Radeon and Intel Arc GPUs work with Ollama, ROCm vs Vulkan, and how unified-memory mini PCs like the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 compare.
Why run AI locally? Privacy, cost and control explained
What local AI actually protects, where it doesn't, when the cost works out, and how to keep a local setup genuinely private.
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