{"id":262132,"date":"2026-06-02T08:27:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T12:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/02\/i-tried-this-open-source-chatgpt-alternative-on-linux-but-went-back-to-ollama\/"},"modified":"2026-06-02T12:25:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T16:25:18","slug":"i-tried-this-open-source-chatgpt-alternative-on-linux-but-went-back-to-ollama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/02\/i-tried-this-open-source-chatgpt-alternative-on-linux-but-went-back-to-ollama\/","title":{"rendered":"I Tried This Open Source ChatGPT Alternative on Linux, But Went Back to Ollama"},"content":{"rendered":"

I Tried This Open Source ChatGPT Alternative on Linux, But Went Back to Ollama<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/itsfoss.com\/jan-ai\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-06-02 08:27:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: itsfoss.com<\/a><\/p>\n

I may hate AI slop but I am not a AI hater. I have found decent use of the AI tools and I try to include these tools in my workflow wherever it makes sense.<\/p>\n

While mainstream LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity have decent free offering, they leach on the user data. “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product”.<\/p>\n

That’s why I am loving the idea of exploring local AI and I have spend my fair share of time experimenting with LLMs that can be run on normal systems. <\/p>\n

Recently, I discovered Jan AI. It is a polished, genuinely usable desktop app that runs entirely on my machine. In fact, I once tried replacing Ollama and llama cpp with Jan AI, but later changed my mind. <\/p>\n

I’ll explain why I switched back to Ollama in the later sections. First, let’s learn about Jan AI.<\/p>\n

What is Jan AI?<\/h2>\n

Jan is a free and open-source desktop application that lets you run various large language models directly on your own hardware. You can think of it as a self-hosted, offline-capable ChatGPT, except the model runs on your CPU or GPU, and no data ever leaves your machine.<\/p>\n

The project is developed by the Jan.ai company, and the source code is available on GitHub under the AGPL-3.0 license. It’s built on top of llama.cpp under the hood, which means it can run quantized GGUF models efficiently even without a dedicated GPU.<\/p>\n

What I found impressive is that Jan’s desktop application is built using the Tauri framework instead of Electron JS, which gives it a good performance boost and I think eats less RAM, too. <\/p>\n

A quick catch, you still need plenty of RAM for running your local LLM.<\/p>\n

The app supports Linux, macOS, and Windows. I used it on my Linux machine.<\/p>\n

System requirements<\/h3>\n

Running a local LLM with Jan AI does require decent hardware. Here’s what to realistically expect:<\/p>\n