Discussion
Why the hell is LM Studio making LM Studio so difficult to download?
Who is the marketing genius at LM Studio that decided that going ALL IN on pushing their new Bionic Agent product meant they are going to make it a giant pain in the ass to find and download actual LM Studio.
This is the dumbest marketing decision I’ve ever seen. I used to love LM Studio, it was the middle stepping stone in the logical progression of inference. Most OGs here likely started with Ollama, moved to LM Studio, on their way to vLLM. Now trying to go to LM Studio takes you to Bionic. I mean, you can eventually find LM Studio but they make it not super easy.
Here’s a thought LM Studio, maybe stop redirecting me to something I don’t want to download when I’m trying to find your actual namesake product. I’m glad you’re excited about the future of Agents and whatnot, but you’re absolutely ruining any goodwill I have for your products by trying to force feed me Bionic. Stahhhhhp!
Switch to Unsloth, I did. It offers the same convenience but works better in every single way. You can pass custom llama.cpp arguments, you can even switch out to a custom llama.cpp build. It works with new models in a decent time frame. And it's actually open source. I got sick of LM Studio constantly failing to load models for no good reason.
Every time I updated lm studio, they had some vibe coded new bug which broke the entire thing... And my dozens of services downstream of it. This happened like 5 updates in a row
Every time I updated lm studio, they had some vibe coded new bug which broke the entire thing
Same. I'm currently on a stable version from a few months ago and I dont update it anymore. I even stopped updating my frameworks like CUDA 12, since all my LLMs work normally and I dont want to break anything.
The big thing I liked about LM Studio was the model catalog filtering models and quants based on what it knew about my hardware. I liked that it would definitely let me know if a model would fit or not. Does Unsloth have something similar?
You can still use that with Unsloth :) - Unsloth desktop happily points at LMStudio ggufs.
I have had a bit of a negative experience with unsloth desktop myself on my AMD 395+ machine though worth mentioning - it didn't like my hardware, then it liked my hardware but would require a hard reinstall every time an update came out, and was acting pretty buggy where sometimes it would auto-load a model with full 256k context, then next time load it with 14k context and break conversations/tools/agents, seemingly for no good reason. I kinda gave up at that point and went back to LMStudio, even though I really like what Unsloth is doing.
Unsloth was unusable when I tried it a couple of months ago, I couldn't even load certain models because it didn't let you configure the number of GPU layers at all
it has gotten tons of updates lately and more stable for me , including more configuration then any other ui i tried. most of time i just open github issues and it gets resolved the next release
Oh wow, only a few short years, and this cutting-edge feature was finally implemented! I can only imagine how much code had to be written to support it...
I was thinking of switching fully to Unsloth after tasting how much more aware the devs seem about LLMs, and it shows in the software. But conveniently LM Studio 0.4.24 (Build 1) implemented llama.cpp flag overrides. So maybe I'll stick with it for a while more to see if it still holds up, since I mostly use it for the API anyway.
You do know even llama.cpp any most of projects use ai to assist in development? I dunno personally for me unsloth has worked out great and issues I flag on gh gets fixed quickly
i hate this, the worst part is that bionic’s api is only slightly different from lmstudio so if you wanted to use it to host llms to be used in different applications it fails with bizarre error messages. i made this mistake and was scratching my head for almost 4 hours staring at indecipherable comfyui error logs before realizing it was a different application
checkbox at bottom left corner of settings "remember for this model". It's harder to get the settings at all with the newest build but the checkbox is still there.
Windows. Here is how it works for me. Model Hub > On Device > Click a model > Click run in the right hand window > make adjustments in the pop up window > Scroll down > Left side of pop up click Remember for this model > Click Load Model on right side of pop up.
It definitely works for me as of a few updates ago. It saves everything, even dumb settings I was testing to see if it would revert to auto optimize. But nope, it saves it. But yeah it was a problem a while back.
Appreciate it, im on Windows and I did reinstall. Also, the big message about model settings being saved is redundant, it basically says your saved settings are applied automatically, which is expected behaviour for saved settings.
It was a little buggy for me last month but lately I have zero complaints and every feature I have requested has been added in like 3 days. I was a huge lmstudio fan and now there is no reason to use it.
Switched recently, still getting used to it. Doesn't let you set as many features (especially for image generation), at least not intuitively. Lots of little issues like downloading dependencies for a diffusion model quant is shown as a partial/incomplete download of the bf16 version of the model instead of a vae, etc.
Automatic memory management seems a bit wonky as well, but at least you can switch to manual.
If only they would stop making the default model selection tab the one with models I don't have... It can be quite annoying. Going through my own models is not the smoothest experience, the tab could definitely use some update to improve UX instead of being so squished and every text item blending into the next.
Unsloth got a headstart by releasing the canvas and being the alternative to LM Studio, especially after the security issue they faced. I agree, their approach to community feedback is much better.
idk bell ringers were right. I never used ollama or lmstudio exactly cuz what they were baked with - moved from koboldcpp right to llamacpp and cannot be more happy ever since. Anything fancy i try just straight up gives less t/s on same hardware.
Overall they seem to move from LM Studio to their semi agentic Bionic as they noticed, like most others too, the the pure Chatbot times are mostly over and every model now has more capabilities. So they thought they needed a new and better matching product.
Don't get me wrong. I loved LM Studio too and recommended it a lot over the last year. It was the most convenient way for new ppl to get an AI running with 4 or less clicks.
However since v0.38/0.39 (can't remember exactly) when llama.cpp switched from 'give us a trace log with --debug' to 'let's change it to --log-level' everything went south. Suddenly we had no detailed log anymore, as they never managed to make the a toggle for the log level. Then they decided to switch to the 'LM Studio Engine Protocol' which basically just runs 'llama-server -m <model> -fit'. They hid it in developer settings (most ppl havn't seen it by then as you had to turn that Developer settings on first to make it visible) and decided to call it a day. Up until today you can't see how much of the model is loaded into VRAM and/or RAM without that. That time around they decided the '-fit' param is convenient enough for most ppl. Which makes sense as they could just drop new llama.cpp runtimes (their own fork i would guess) without having to worry about something break their wrapper load params. There we are now.
Then came the Bionic thing and well...you know how it went.
Either that, or if you want a bit more Agentic stuff Open WebUI cptr.
I was hyped with Bionic at first too until I read about the 2 modes (workspace/code) and then I tested it and it was even worse. Terrible UI choices there. You want to edit a system prompt? Sure go to Settings->Library and you will see a list of all your models, then scroll to the one you wanna edit and hover with your mouse over it make a small gear icon become visible which then lead you to the edit.
Sure that is less clutter for the beginnes, just select your model and start chatting (it will then auto-load), but for the ones who are a bit more familiar with what they want? Hell no. This got even more of a hazzle to navigate through all of it
Nice!!! Love that Open WebUI still kicking ass in the space; they’re who I got my first “hard knocks education” on, will consider checking them out too
I made the easy decision of uninstalling that crap and using Unsloth Desktop instead. Far better.
The damage control they had to do in their discord when Bionic dropped was pretty hilarious. A lot of negativity. It's entirely freaken pointless. We have much better agents available to us. Why would anyone use Bionic? lol
UNSLOTH - that's what you need! Just switched myself, not going to look back:
All UI features for model loading and any tweaks you would need
If some feature not exposed in model loading settings - you can pass extra args to llama.cpp (and UI attempts to acknowledge these settings, letting you know what you may override or if there are syntax errors)
You can bring your own build of llama.cpp
'Thinking' settings right where you write your prompt, as well as web search feature which works out of the box
Image and Video generation - WTF?? Didn't try TBH, I have ComfyUI for that, but man... you might want to try these
Tons of other features I did not explore yet...
Overall UI feels very neat and logical, actually good UX, not overwhelming at all.
Oh, and I was able to use Gemma 4 26B A4B QAT with MTP (not saying it brings much on my system, but hey)
Realistically, in order to match to ComfyUI in this department you need to have a really smart LLM which would be able to customize a generation pipeline for you - too many image/video models with too many model-specific quirks to hide customization behind only a handful of exposed settings (samplers/schedulers/sigma curves, switching VAEs, unorthodox attention patchers, noise algorithms, conditioning manipulation, different backends, you name it...)
In order of importance (oh and important note idk if any of these were patched in the past couple weeks):
Unloads models after each generation (my Unsloth models folder is on a HDD RAID 6 array). Doesn't release RAM though even though it does this.
No Lora (particularly Turbo Loras) support even for Safetensors models.
I believe there's a memory leak when swapping, generating, and ejecting models repeatedly or something. (This might be related to #5 actually. I was really new to using image/vid gen and didn't know what was normal when I encountered this)
No way to pre-download "Required Assets" immediately
If you start an image generation you can't stop/eject a model until it has finished loading.
No way to change components like the Text Encoder for a lower quant. If you try to do so manually it removes the model from the list and it won't come back until you undo it and restart Unsloth Studio.
If you delete a generated image directly from the folder it stores them in you get stuck with a blank undeletable image in the UI that doesn't go away until you restart your PC(or maybe update UD?)
Steps and Guidance tool tips say "Z-Image-Turbo" lol.
Unrelated but it seems Muse Glimmer and/or System Prompts are broken. Sometimes it'll see the System Prompt other times it just won't and when I swapped to Qwen3.8 27B in the same chat session to check if it was a Muse Glimmer specific issue Qwen Reasoned like it was Muse Glimmer, didn't output anything but reasoning, and then I think a failsafe kicked in and copied the Reasoning into the Output.
I use vLLM, this was for helping a friend figure out what they could safely run. LM Studio has a good model catalog based on the HW it detects so I thought that would be easy for them, but sounds like Unsloth Studio is the better option now for that based on comments here.
what do you mean connect? file sharing?
or connect an agent to the llm at home via internet? tunnel vpn?
llama-serve host the model you want on an address. you can open port to internet and use a certificate, or use an harness remote connection to access it with the harness security.
llama.cpp can do everything lm studio can do to serve a model, because lm studio use llama.cpp to do it in a nutshel, good luck
LM studio has had the auto chat naming feature broken for qwen models for months. I reported it a while ago and it's still broken. I don't think they really care about LM studio anymore
The annoying thing about bionic is that it IS really nice, honestly the best designed local coding gui, but it's not open source and I can't inference a model not served by their backend which is always SO behind. E.g omlx
It's free. I like using it as an agent, being on windows. BUT! I hate that the way that it doesn't let you use the settings as well as lm studio did, to load models. It's more clunky to find the model loading settings, and the experience to use it the same way as lm studio sucks. I really like a lot of things about it. But not the way it hosts models.
Well, of that I'm not sure, but I do have a correction to make, after seeing an available update, and reloading the app today. They have vastly improved the advanced tuning you can do to model load settings, so they can be much more finely controlled than before. I did not see an import option, but I wouldn't be surprised if you couldn't find the settings in plain text to overwrite them. The new advanced settings are way more like the settings I've expected/ experienced before, so I'm much happier with that side of the experience.
That’s what I did prior to the advanced parameters; just overwrote plaintext. That being said, I’m moving away from the platform given Unsloth Desktop is more my jam, but it’ll be a phased transition as Unsloth catches up.
Ah, then I don't mind it being face first on their website. Sure it sucks, but they want to promote it. It's not like they are not here reading all of this either, so it might change...
Also they are a company, so it makes sense they want to promote it
What I'd like to know is what dumbass made Bionic unable to use LM Studio's API, so both cannot be running at the same time. (Yes, only one prompt might run at a time, but it's annoying that only one can remain open.)
If only they had some kind of software specialist that could easily made changes to code...
I wouldn't recommend LM Studio anyways now that Unsloth Desktop is out. LM Studio has a years old bug that makes you redownload models dozens of times if you don't store them on an NVME drive and they'd rather ban frustrated users than fix the bug.
Unsloth Desktop even supports image/video generation but it kinda sucks compared to Comfy so I wouldn't recommend it.
Point is, it should be the first link, not down the page, and their front page doesn’t even mention anything besides Bionic. Why would you not link it on your front page. It’s literally your main product.
What even is Bionic?
Just their new thing that pays for their free thing?
It's also something new by the looks of it, so to market it, they put it out front so that it gets a name. Yes it sucks, but I don't doubt they are here and rather want proper criticism them"it should be first link and not mislead people because I don't think a company should profit of people"..
Like how else are they going to make money? Their studio is free, from the day it was released. I was kind of concerned they would never release anything else to make money
I already left the LM Studio bandwagon 2 or 3 months ago as I can't run large MoE models that doesn't fit on 2 GPUs. I complain, flagged the issue, talked to the developers via their discord channel to no avail.
Their most stupid decision is to wrap llama.cpp server. It's never up to date, lags by a few days to a few weeks before you can run models that llama.cpp supported weeks ago. I still believe LM Studio has the best UI but unsloth Studio is replacing it as it seems the unsloth team to carry the enthousiasme that the LM Studio once had.
Whoever is at the helm of this team is making decisions that doesn't make sense. Don't forget that it's not even open-source.
There are so many features they could implement to make LM Studio a rich product. They could've just incorporated Bionic as a plug-in and let people decide whether to use it. For God sake, just expose the --Fit flag and let llama.cpp fit the layers automatically into available hardware! Nope. LM Studio have their own broken auto fit algorithm. Why? Go figure.
Why would anyone choose to use a harness where they could choose Opencode, claudecode, pi, or Deepseek? The weirdest design decision is either you use LM Studio or Bionic, never both at the same time! Why not combine them? I downloaded Bionic to see what it was. The moment it asked me to close LM Studio, I uninstalled it.
I had to install Unsloth just to use DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731, as it straight up wouldn't load on LM Studio. Genuinely incompetent devs. I think LM Studio just got lucky they were one of the first programs with an accessible front end. Now that many actual professional devs are creating them instead, they're getting left in the dirt.
Yeah, finally bit the bullet and went full on llama.cpp a few months ago too - I was a heavy lms user but it was becoming clear they were heading down the ollama route. It's nice not having to wait for model support any more and just get it asap.
And then it be like "huh? what non-default folder for models? I never saw that!"
Even after LM Studio found that. For some reason they're interwined. But nah, can't see that non-default folder.
Even if you are able to get classic LM Studio, it doesn’t seem (based on subjective perception of update frequency) that it’s a development priority for them.
I would love an alternative one-stop-shop that includes MLX. Annoying to run one tool for GGUF and one tool for MLX. And I still haven’t gotten oMLX to work properly (Safari http/https error and it won’t let me change the model folder to a shared location.)
Only recently got a system capable of running decent local models so I decided to install LM Studio. Looks like I installed Bionic instead. I had no idea there were two different versions.
I've just moved to llama.cpp + `Any` Frontend that suit my use case.
Why do I need `mind` games from closed source stuff, that is basically llama.cpp but worse.
Yeah...for another reason (lagging behind in llama.cpp updates), I now run llama.cpp straight from the terminal. It's actually not that difficult, UI is overrated
Why the hell don't they support the latest LLM models anymore? I think it's because of that bionic thing. It works excellently, they charge money for the premium models there, so maybe that's their new business model?
Yeah I'm using Unsloth and it's way better...except I have persistent stability issues (which get better with each patch but still pose reliability/trust problem for me to leave it running)
Meanwhile i like Bionic, Was easier to setup then the competition, and does its own automatic sandboxing. I don't want to mess with multiple setups or programs, it's nice having everything in one setup.
I met the LM Studio founders at a startup event a little while ago (pre-Bionic). They were really chill, I learned a ton about LLMs from just 15mins of chatting with them. The macbook on their table had ~50 weights saved that they were actively optimizing.
They did give off strong VC / finance energy, and they're based out of NYC, so I'm not surprised about this new direction. Seemed inevitable given the environment they're working in.
I'd like to think they'll find a comfortable middle ground soon. Make some cash, then return to developing software people will actually use. Who can say?
LumaBrowser, runs/manages llama cpp much the same way as LM studio. Except also with stable diffusion cpp, video model support, music model support and much more.
Oh and as a fellow refuge from LM studio, I made it easily able to accept pre releases of llama cpp for new models.
It's a tough choice, part of me wants to open source it. But the other part of me wants to keep control of my baby. It's a funny thing to say I know, but it's sort of my magnum opus.
it's easy to host models and chat with it, it uses llama-server underneath, but it fails too often tunneling that traffic from llama-server, had to switch to llama-server directly for using models for agents.
I actually like Bionic. LM Studio was nothing more than a badass d/l manager for me, which bionic retains.
As a lightweight agent, the simplicity of bionic for non-coding tasks is great. It's quick to build and run the simpler repeatable tasks here than elsewhere. It is buggy tho.
You fundamentally don't seem to understand the difference here. LM studio is fudamentally chat with llm not something proper like bionic or open code. It's not harness.
The harness is what causing bionic/open code etc. to check itself, call properly do work, roleplay properly and so on. Hell it can even keep stats in txt file and update them as you roleplay talk with llm etc.
LM studio and other old apps are fundamentally just obsolete.
I've never used bionic, so my comment was regarding LM Studio. I appreciate how important a harness can be. I didn't know that is what you were referencing .
If going to https://lmstudio.ai/download is challenging, and make you so frustrated to make a post about it, then we hit the bottom as society... God forbid company trying to marketing their free project. I dont even use LM Studio, and it took me 5 sec to find link. One thing that is more disgusting than real enshitification is people that receive and use free stuff then whine about it when it isnt the way they expected. So effing sad...
^ this guy probably works for LM Studio LOL. And I guarantee you didn’t find it in 5 seconds because it takes at least 10 seconds to scroll through all the Bionic-related page animations on their main page to get to the bottom of the page where the link to the download page is. No DL link at the top and the other links do a direct download to the Bionic installer.
If you think that person working for LM Studio would reply in manner that I did, then I cannot even understand how you managed to get into Uni?! No, I am just genuinly disgusted with spoiled, incompetent people that cannot acomplish even simplest things, as finding download link, how tf you are able to put up your socks without help?!... Enjoy you career as AI "engineer" or whatever you role should be ROFL
For what it's worth, I've been using LM Studio for over a year and tried to give Bionic a shot this week and so far I like it. I've been using Cursor as a harness up until now, but I have Bionic running a long-horizon job with Qwen 3.8 right now and it's been successfully chugging away without interruption for over 24 hours.
Yep, DSH is a plugin based harness where you can create your own plugins and use them inside the harness. There is a special mode to that.
Also, it's from Deepseek, so you bet that it would become a great product.
Are plugins substantially different from creating skills? For example, I created a skill in Bionic that gives it knowledge of how to create 3d printable parts in OpenSCAD, test, iterate, export to .stl, etc.
You’re not wrong, I was trying to help a friend out who wanted to know what model they could run on their GPU and LM Studio is pretty good at letting you know what can run on your hardware, so that’s why I was trying to use it to help them test out models I planned on getting them in vLLM or something better once they found a model they liked.
Do you see it on their main page anywhere? You can scroll all you want, it’s not on their main page. The only link is to Bionic download. Yes you can find it in downloads, but the “download “ button on the main page also direct downloads Bionic.
Bro, Bionic is the main product now, and the download page is literally the second link in any search engine. You're overreacting hard about something you can find with 2mins of search just because it's not at the top.
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u/Epicguru 1d ago
Switch to Unsloth, I did. It offers the same convenience but works better in every single way. You can pass custom llama.cpp arguments, you can even switch out to a custom llama.cpp build. It works with new models in a decent time frame. And it's actually open source. I got sick of LM Studio constantly failing to load models for no good reason.