I want someone to prove his LLM can be as insightful and accurate as paid one.

Are you using LLMs as search engines?

Bold.

I use Gemma, LLama 3.2, and Deepseek to either fix formatting, summarize documentation to give me commands for Linux software, and write simple code structure for me to refine into working code.

Sure it takes longer to generate than a cloud compute would, but

1. privacy obviously. I know you dismissed it but that’s really the biggest reason anyone will have.

2. this feels better environmentally. I actually don’t know if that’s true, but it objectively touches less computers for such simple tasks. It would be wasteful of infrastructure to do it over the web.

3. it’s just cooler to have a conversation with my computer. I’ve learned a lot about how the whole process works and that’s more valuable to me as a non dev than just getting the end results.

My “production” home lab is 3 Optiplex 3050 with i7-7700. They work great and are pretty low power.