Which Qwen should you run?
"Qwen" isn't one model, it's a family, and the sub-family matters more than most guides let on.
| Sub-family | Good for | Ollama tag prefix |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3 | General reasoning, multilingual, agentic tasks. The default choice on this site's own recommendations. | qwen3: |
| Qwen2.5 | General reasoning and RAG, still widely used and well-supported. | qwen2.5: |
| Qwen2.5-Coder | Code generation and debugging specifically; see the coding guide for more. | qwen2.5-coder: |
| Qwen3.6 | The newest flagship-tier release: a 27B dense model with a 256K context window, Apache 2.0 licensed. | qwen3.6: |
Unless you have a specific reason otherwise, Qwen3 is the right starting point, matching the picks in best local LLM by hardware tier: 8B for 8GB VRAM, 14B for 12-16GB, 32B for 24GB. A newer Qwen3.8 dense variant has started showing up in community rankings as this guide gets checked; it's worth a look if you want the newest option, but Qwen3 remains a solid, well-supported default and isn't going away.
The commands
ollama run qwen3:14b
ollama run qwen3:32b
Check your exact fit for any of these in the hardware calculator before downloading, especially at 14B or 32B where headroom for context matters.
The tag-naming trap
Typing ollama pull qwen3 with no size tag doesn't ask you which one you want. It silently downloads the 8B model. If you meant to grab the 14B or 32B version and left the tag off, you'll end up running a smaller model than you intended with no error or warning. Always include the size explicitly: qwen3:14b, not just qwen3.
The context window gotcha
Qwen models, like most, ship with a runtime default context window that's scaled to conserve memory, and it's often smaller than the model's actual maximum. If you paste in a long document or have an extended conversation, Ollama can silently truncate the beginning of it rather than warning you, so responses start ignoring things you said earlier. The fix is a custom Modelfile that sets the context length explicitly:
Save that as a file named Modelfile, then build and run it as a named variant:
ollama run qwen3-32k
A larger context window uses more memory (see the calculator's context length setting for the real cost), so don't set it larger than you'll actually use.