Hey :) For a while now I use gpt-oss-20b on my home lab for lightweight coding tasks and some automation. I’m not so up to date with the current self-hosted LLMs and since the model I’m using was released at the beginning of August 2025 (From an LLM development perspective, it feels like an eternity to me) I just wanted to use the collective wisdom of lemmy to maybe replace my model with something better out there.
I find Qwen3.5 is the best at toolcalling and agent use, otherwise Gemma4 is a very solid all-rounder and it should be the first you try. Tbh gpt-oss is still good to this day, are you running into any problems w it?
I’m not on there, but you might have more luck in !localllama@sh.itjust.works
You might also want to list the hardware that you plan to use, since that’ll constrain what you can reasonably run.
How much VRAM?
The latest open weights model from google might be a good fit for you. The 26B model works pretty well on my machine, though the performance isn’t great (6 tokens per second, CPU only).
I’m in the same boat. You’ll get better responses if you post your machine specs. I
I’d say Qwen 3.5 and Gemma 4 beat GPT OSS in every aspect.
