Hey, funny finding you comment as I've actually recently been developing a CLI app to improve LLM integration in my filesystem. Not sure what you are doing with your files, but maybe it could be useful for you too! You can check it out on my github (https://github.com/gael-vanderlee/whai) and hopefully that can help you with your use case. Look into roles in particular, as they allow you to save and reuse specific workflows.

I believe what you're describing is outside of the scope of Gerbil. Gerbil is not an LLM front-end, but Gerbil will run your LLM and seamlessly integrate (orchestrate) it with a custom front-end from the list in my original message. I believe this functionality will need to live in a custom front-end. I'm curious how jan.ai is planning on handling this. I'm guessing they're writing their own custom front-ends which is probably tightly integrated with their system.

That's how the pros do it. Yes, you can load both a text and image gen models at the same time. Needless to say you'll need a very beefy GPU(s) to do this so I wouldn't recommend it unless you know exactly what you're doing as generally you'll want to max out your VRAM for one model at a time for the highest quality results. Open webui and sillytavern allow both text and image gen from the same UI although I wouldn't recommend it for advanced users. Otherwise Gerbil will give you multiple pages to toggle through via the titlebar dropdown.

Gerbil's built-in image generation is based on "StableUI" and I also prefer its super simple UI. Yes, you can load your own LoRa from the "Image Generation" tab. Gerbil also includes the optional ComfyUI integration from the settings for very advanced users. Its graph-based UI is a bit too advanced for me personally.

Holy, your machine is a beast. 96GB of VRAM is pretty insane. I've been running a single 16GB VRAM AMD GPU. At the bottom of Gerbil's readme I listed out my setup where I use a 27b text gen model (gemma 3) but you'll be able to use much larger models and everything will run super fast.

Now as for your question, I started out with LM studio too, but the problem is that you'll need to juggle multiple apps if you want to do text gen or image gen or if you want to use a custom front-end. As an example, my favorite text gen front-end is "open webui" which gerbil can automatically set up for you (as long as you have Python's uv pre-installed). Gerbil will allow you to run text, image and video gen, as well as set up (and keep updated) any of the front-ends that I listed in my original post. I could be wrong but I'm not sure if LM studio can legally integrate GLP licensed software in the same way that Gerbil can because it's a closed source app.

Not OP, but I am running ollama as a testing ground for various projects ( separately from gpt sub ).

<< Is there a reason for me to choose Gerbil instead? Or something else entirely?

My initial reaction is positive, because it seems to integrate everything without sacrificing being able to customize it further if need be. That said, did not test it yet, but now I will.