Well, if you’re coming from a Windows packground, a flatpak is roughly, to the user at least, similar to an exe.

You download a flatpak, install it, blingo blango it has its own environment that is essentially sandboxed, as it pulls in its own dependencies and such.

But, you’ll need to either go with a linux distro that comes with flatpak support pre-configured, or, set up flatpak support on a different distro.

Once you’ve got either of those, there are free app ‘stores’ for flatpak that make it extremely simple to browse, download, install a flatpak program.

Then you just click, download Alpaca, run it, and its got a menu, add new models, search through what it has access to, “Qwen 3”, 8b parameter variant, download, then use it.

I am personally using Bazzite at the moment, I used to use a bunch of Debian, variants of Debian (Ubuntu, PopOS), have futzed around with Arch and even Void… Bazzite is so far the happy medium I’ve found between stability, extensibility, and also being pretty close to cutting edge in terms of driver updates and kernel updates.

If you wanna try WSL (which is named backwards, but whatever), I… I have no idea what you’d have to do to get flatpaks working… on… Windows… but if you think you can, best of luck!

I use the Alpaca flatpak, it just lets you download a variety of models, manages them all inside a contained local environment.

Even has some tools support that is expanding, basic web searches, speech to text, text to speech… and if you can find a GGUF format model, supposedly Alpaca can run this manually, and there’s a good deal on huggingface.

https://github.com/Jeffser/Alpaca

Unfortunately, if you’re running Windows, I… have no clue how to set up an LLM there.

Also your tin foil hat thing isn’t even tin foil hat.

Like, various people in the AI space have outright stated that they want to see a paradigm where everyone just rents compute time from them because PCs are othereise too expensive, while acting like it just happens to be the new reality that everything is so expensive, for some reason.

Nvidia went from gaming GPUs being about 50% of its business to something more like 5%, in about 5 years.

Fortunately the AI bubble will be popping soon, as … everyone has run out of money to lend.

Unfrotunately this will destroy the economies of the West.

Yay capitalism!

Goddamnit that one’s my favorite outta this thread haha!

Here’s my try:

Kathmandu?

… I dunno, can he? What can cat man do?

What do you mean by ‘local AI suffering’?

Did you mean to say ‘surviving’?

As in small, less capable, but still potentially useful when used in sane ways… people doing more of that?

Like, the fundamental problem with the idea of local AI dying out as a thing… is that most of the Chinese developed models are developed under a much more open souce type of paradigm.

Its not 100% open source, but its way more open source than than US corpo models.

So… anybody can still download an run one of those.

I’ve had Qwen3-8B working on my Steam Deck for around a year now. Not super fast, but it does work, and… a Steam Deck is not exactly a juggernaut of GPU compute power.

Anybody with a modern laptop could figure it out.

Alternative outcomes:

Gaming bifurcates.

Indies and certain AAs aim for the ‘good ending’, realize fancy graphics are not only harder to produce, but you’re actually just shooting yourself in the foot in terms of potential customers.

AAA on the other hand continues to double down and enshittify, figure out new ways to turn gaming into leasing and renting.

… but, as always, mostly marketing, ad campaigns, paying off “journalists” and “influencers”.

3rd potential outcome:

Something akin to lan parties/netcafes/arcades recurs.

Rent out a space, run a local to global network solution and also a miniature rendering farm.

All the actual PCs (or maybe VR headsets) are connected to cheap, thin client local machines that are then networked to the mini rendering farm.

4th potential outcome:

… nobody can actually stop people from emulating or running old, good games. ‘Piracy’ becomes as normalized in many other parts of the world as it is in Russia currently.