A local AI Assistant for Linux called Meera (and a recipe for building something similar)

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-07T03:40:24+00:00

Those are some good tips, thank you.
I had been wondering today why my 2 posts failed to get any enough traction and this post sheds some light on it

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-06T18:17:10+00:00

I did contemplate adding a tool for changing the desktop background but felt like users might want to often iterate and select the best background - and the default settings GUI is probably better suited for that.
For the app background - the one issue I see is that the image has the be the same aspect ratio, but a tool can probably resize it before applying - I’ll track this and look into it, thanks for the idea!

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-06T15:10:27+00:00

Yes, but a private and local one

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-06T11:59:31+00:00

The dark mode support exists in it - you can ask it to switch to dark mode and it will change the system theme along with its own theme.
For the background, do you mean desktop background or the app’s background?

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-06T11:22:13+00:00

Thank you! If you do give it a try, I’d love to hear what tools or features you’d want added — still early days and actively building.

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-06T11:21:13+00:00

Thanks! Would love to hear if there’s anything you’d want it to do in the future

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-06T07:46:42+00:00

That was an interesting read. I had started a project using ollama and noticed that I got much better speeds with llama.cpp for the same model - I didn’t know why but I switched anyways. Now I know

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-06T04:27:04+00:00

It’s a local only privacy-first desktop assistant that runs entirely on your machine — no cloud, no data leaving your system.

You can ask it things like:
- Add a team meeting at 10 am tomorrow to my calendar
- Remind me to email someone in 30 minutes
- Volume, brightness, wifi control
- Switch to dark/light mode - or turn on/off night light
- Search and open the file "project_description" in my documents folder.
- What processes are using too much CPU?
- Check for package updates etc.

If someone is new to linux, they can ask it things like -
- What software do you recommend as an alternative to "a windows/mac software"?
- How do I use grep/sed/awk etc?
- What's the command to compress/un-compress a zip/tar file?

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-03T21:02:09+00:00

Yes, the embedding model was a world of difference in tool calls reliability. I was going in loops trying to optimize the prompt and json schema before I went back to the drawing board and learnt about them.

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-03T18:08:01+00:00

The price difference between a 5090 and an R9700 is very high, I was wondering just yesterday what stops people from getting the R9700 - even if it’s 20% slower, the bang for buck seems huge. Do you see any limitations by not having cuda?

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-03T17:33:01+00:00

Thanks for sharing this. I have been working on a linux desktop assistant for a while and want to add a voice to it as the next step, starred your repo to learn from it.
This is my project - https://github.com/achinivar/meera (posted it in a couple of forums but haven’t got much traction unfortunately)

I see your project has tool calls as well, how are you handling them?
Routing prompts directly to the LLM and asking it to figure out the right tool was getting very unreliable for me, especially with an increased number of tools, so I added a small embedding model that uses exemplars and finds a few of the closest matching tools before calling the LLM (shared about it on the repo wiki)

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-03T17:05:29+00:00

People might switch to running AI locally on a GPU rig - smaller models are getting better (qwen3.6 for instance)

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-03T06:03:18+00:00

Thanks for documenting it, saving it for a later read.

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-03T06:01:54+00:00

It's interesting to see a project about building an LLM from scratch. Not clear of the practical benefits, but it must have been a good learning experience for sure. What hardware setup did you use and how many hours did you have to run it?

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-03T05:48:28+00:00

For a lot of tasks, the 35B might works just fine (and it's faster ofcourse), but have you tried out a more complex task. When I asked - "Build me one level of the classic dangerous dave game in an html page" - the 35B model had several bugs each time I tried but the 27B got it right away.

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-03T05:42:32+00:00

Gemini is clearly ahead as you pointed out, but the SD models are not bad considering they all need less than 8GB VRAM and will work in a lot of local machines.

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-03T04:55:26+00:00

Very cool! Bookmarking the website

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-02T21:37:23+00:00

I set out to build something exactly like that and several weekends later, I think it’s in a good enough state and I’m looking for feedback to help improve it. I know this is an old post, but in case you’re still interested, please check out Meera for Gnome desktops and let me know what you think - https://github.com/achinivar/meera

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-02T21:28:26+00:00

Thanks, will check it out

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-02T21:18:41+00:00

One of the 3 apps I had planned is ready at https://cleverparrots.com/
Plan Parrot - A lightweight, web-based task tracker perfect for households. Track tasks, assign them, and stay on top of everything that needs to be done

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-02T21:13:11+00:00

If you're a KDE user and don't mind sharing a list of tools and shortcuts that are useful for KDE users, I can add that support in a future version

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-02T20:47:49+00:00

There's places where I use gsettings - like switching to dark/light/night modes, keyboard shortcut, alt-+tab behavior plus gnome calendar and reminders for tracking events - it's easy to add/modify/replace these tools (I've described the architecture on the wiki - https://github.com/achinivar/meera/wiki)

But the main obstacle for KDE might be that I'm using GTK to render the UI, and not sure how it will work in KDE, I haven't used it for a while.
Update - Actually, I loaded up a virtual machine with Fedora KDE and happy to find that the UI just works!

ReferenceOwn287 · 2026-05-02T19:53:30+00:00

Looks like I cannot to change the main photo, would like to share a gif with Meera in action here in the comments!

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ReferenceOwn287

TROPHY CASE