The age of local LLMs is here

Half a year ago, I wanted to see for myself what can we currently have with local LLMs. I went down the rabbit hole, learned quite a lot in the process, and shared my results in an article . The results were pretty discouraging: even with 32 GB VRAM, the best models I could run were both too slow and too dumb. At the same time, what you could get for free from inference providers was actually decent - and much faster. I remember my conclusion: "Let's wait for the next generation of models, which looks very promising. If we can run something comparable to full-size Qwen3-Coder-480B locally, that would be year of the Linux Desktop age of fully capable local LLMs. And now this day has arrived. Models Half a year later, I'm revisiting this question. And this time, the whole situation has turned upside-down. Almost none of the providers still have free tier, and anything that's still free is barely good enough even for the simplest tasks. And is rate-limited all over. And on the local side, the next Qwen lineup is out. So, that's what I'm going to be looking at. Once again, I have two RX6800's, 16 GB each, and 64 GB RAM. On one hand, this is more VRAM than any "normal person" can have with one GPU - unless you've got something specifically for AI, like an unified-memory Mac or a DGX Spark. On the other hand, RX6800 is "pre-AI" - anything newer will have much better performance thanks to tensor processors. Qwen3.6-27B : This is a dense model, so basically you can't run it at all on anything less than 32 GB VRAM. It's the slowest one, but also the best one if you can run it. Its accuracy is claimed to be on par with Claude 4.5 Opus, and better than Qwen3.5-397B-A17B . This is what I've been waiting for. It runs reasonably fast on my setup, so it's very much usable both in terms of performance and accuracy. Qwen3.6-35B-A3B : This one is MoE, and it's pretty small, so it's the fastest one. It's good for anything that doesn't require too much (i.e. for agentic tasks that don'