LM Studio makes it easy to run LLMs on one’s own hardware, whether as a desktop app or a server for others in one’s organization. But LM Studio isn’t the only project of its kind. Unsloth, a team of two brothers (Daniel and Michael Han), have created their own local-first application for running and training models on local hardware, called Unsloth Desktop.
Unsloth Desktop, an open-source Apache-licensed application, intends to do more than just host models locally. It can also be used as a model-training workbench, can be used for image generation as well as standard chat, and runs cross-platform (Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux).
Unlike LM Studio, Unsloth Desktop does not run as a windowed desktop application. When launched, it opens a console (handy for debugging, to be sure), then kicks open a web browser tab to provide a GUI. Although internal updates (for instance, for llama.cpp or other support libraries) are handled automatically from within the program, full updates require running a command at the console. This makes working with Unsloth Desktop a little clunkier than the typical desktop application.
