There is minimal downside to switching to open models

Andrew Marble

marble.onl

June 21, 2026

There was a time not too long ago when using Linux entailed some professional risk . First there was compatibility: you may not have been able to render a Word document or PowerPoint correctly, and you might have had to trust Open Office’s export capability to render docs the way you wanted. There might have been specialty file formats you couldn’t easily view and so couldn’t collaborate. And second, the software ecosystem was just worse generally. There were lots of half-build open-source projects trying to achieve the functionality of mainstream software, but they always had rough edges. I, embarrassingly, stayed on Windows until I left academia over Matlab.

Nowadays I think this issue has largely disappeared. Most productivity software has a web-app, Linux is more mature, open-source software is better. I’m sure that there are all sorts of application specific software (CAD?) that still require a Windows machine, but the gap is much narrower and Linux + open source generally aren’t the “sacrifice” they once were generally.

There remains a clear penalty for being an open LLM user. Every leaderboard consistently gets topped by proprietary models served over API. Today on June 21, 2026, Claude and GPT are at the top of the Artificial Analysis intelligence leaderboard. That’s from the performance side. The compatibility side is worse too. Claude code just works, and more generally, the big two provide nice APIs that make them easy to use, and, even if it’s a low bar, are “trustworthy” in the sense that we’ve largely all agreed we don’t mind sending them our LLM queries and trust them to handle them appropriately.

Open models are served via various means, some by the companies that released them and some by third parties like OpenRouter. Unfortunately, both of these routes are dodgier in terms of privacy and data sharing, and I would not feel the same comfort sending API calls containing client or confidential data to them .

The other option or course is to run them yourself. This solves the privacy issue but is at least two of expensive, complicated, and comparatively slow.

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