This is basically my experience as well. I have a moderately recent but high spec desktop (Radeon 6900 XT with 16 GB VRAM, Ryzen 9 7900X 12-core, 64 GB system RAM), and I tried out some recommended models with ollama a month or two ago. Anything not geared specifically towards coding seemed to struggled with actually making tool calls instead of just stating the actions they would take without making them (and trying to get help from them to explain what I needed to configure to change that behavior was useless; qwen refused to believe that it was running in ollama and insisted that it was running from the Alibaba cloud without access to my local system), and the models intended for coding were barely thinking faster than I could type (if they had any ability to show thinking at all).
The best "free" experience I've found is using OpenCode with Big Pickle. It's not especially smart, so it often won't produce the correct result the first time, but the free tier is generous enough that I don't think I've hit the limit more than twice over around a month with frequent multi-hour sessions. If running locally is truly the goal, it's not going to fit the bill, but if the goal is just "get the best experience without having to pay for a sub or tokens", it's the least bad option I've found so far.
The best "free" experience I've found is using OpenCode with Big Pickle. It's not especially smart, so it often won't produce the correct result the first time, but the free tier is generous enough that I don't think I've hit the limit more than twice over around a month with frequent multi-hour sessions. If running locally is truly the goal, it's not going to fit the bill, but if the goal is just "get the best experience without having to pay for a sub or tokens", it's the least bad option I've found so far.