Running Gemma 4 on a Modest Machine: Unsloth vs LM Studio vs llama.cpp vs Ollama

This is a submission for the Gemma 4 Challenge: Write About Gemma 4

When local AI conversations happen online, they tend to sound like this: "I ran the 70B model on my dual-GPU workstation." or "You only need 64GB RAM and a 24GB graphics card."

Meanwhile, I'm sitting with an Intel i5, 16GB RAM, integrated graphics, roughly 350GB of storage, and no monster GPU hiding under my desk.

That made me curious. If I wanted to build something with Gemma 4 locally, which stack actually makes sense on hardware that most developers realistically own?

So I looked at four names that keep coming up: Unsloth, LM Studio, llama.cpp, and Ollama.