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- May 2, 2018
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In my previous guide, I showed how to set up a local AI model with Ollama and Code Ollama. Everything happened in a terminal window. A few of you reached out to me via private message and asked whether they really had to type commands in the terminal to talk to an AI?
No, you don’t. There are two popular GUI options (Open WebUI and LM Studio) and in this guide I’ll explain how to set up one of them (the easiest one) - LM Studio.
But first, let me explain a few things about these two.
In almost every article about “local AI”, you’ll see LM Studio and Open WebUI recommended together, usually as "GUI options for people who don’t like the terminal."
But that’s not entirely true. LM Studio is a normal desktop app - you download an installer, double-click it, and you’re chatting with AI in five minutes.
With Open WebUI it’s a bit more complicated. On Windows it runs either inside Docker Desktop (which needs WSL2 - the Windows Subsystem for Linux) or as a Python process that wants exactly Python 3.11. So if your reason for avoiding the terminal is that this stuff
No, you don’t. There are two popular GUI options (Open WebUI and LM Studio) and in this guide I’ll explain how to set up one of them (the easiest one) - LM Studio.
But first, let me explain a few things about these two.
In almost every article about “local AI”, you’ll see LM Studio and Open WebUI recommended together, usually as "GUI options for people who don’t like the terminal."
But that’s not entirely true. LM Studio is a normal desktop app - you download an installer, double-click it, and you’re chatting with AI in five minutes.
With Open WebUI it’s a bit more complicated. On Windows it runs either inside Docker Desktop (which needs WSL2 - the Windows Subsystem for Linux) or as a Python process that wants exactly Python 3.11. So if your reason for avoiding the terminal is that this stuff



