Is there a resource somewhere that tells me, "Given that you have X Gb RAM on your laptop, these are the current local models you should consider trying and here's how to configure them to leave enough memory for other applications on your machine."?
Are you familiar with Ollama [1]? It is a particularly easy to use tool to download and run local models. They sort models recent popularity and specify size for the various quantization levels.
I would try using ~1/2 your available ram and iterate from there.
If you have 32GB of RAM, I would give Qwen 3.8 a try. All you would have to do is run "ollama pull qwen3.8:27b" then "ollama run qwen3.8:27b". If you have 16GB of RAM, I would try Gemma 4.
It gives astronomically optimistic results for my 16GB M1 Pro :)
By the way own exploration sort of led me to qwen3.5:9b for the best case scenario balanced model considering almost 10-11GB of RAM is almost always gone anyway. Even with aggressive app quitting.
