🎉 Alpaca 9: Characters and Ollama Tweaks 🪪✨ #1088
Replies: 5 comments 1 reply
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minor spelling mistake in the starter guide :( |
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I don't know what's going on, but the Alpaca crash by pressing enter or browsing through the chat 😢. |
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9.01 is installed. I love the download counter, so I can see that something is actually happening. I had a local Ollama installed, but it didn't recognize it being installed. I had to remove the local Ollama instance via the OS. Restart Alpaca and follow install inside Alpaca. |
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Alpaca keeps on crashing btw, even after this new local ollama & instance/model manager. |
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Character cards using version 9.0.4 are working great. Thank you! Is there anyway to replace {{user}} with the real username and {{char}} with the card's character name? |
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I don't have the Characters option anywhere. (flatpak, 9.2.3, instance=OpenRouter) |
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Hi everyone, it's been a while since the last big release of Alpaca, this time I prepared some big changes and a new feature that might completely change how you use Alpaca.
New
Character Cards
The big thing for this update, Character Cards, but... what are they?
Think of them as a way of defining personalities or roles to your models, in a much more meaningful way than before.
Character Cards are not a new concept, you can find thousands of characters online, they are distributed with images, so, to import them to Alpaca you just have to change the profile picture of a model.
You can also create a new character from scratch that you can export to use in other applications!
In this example the character was written to be a narrator for an Umamusume scenario (I couldn't think of anything better lol)
You have the option to change the description, first message, alternative greetings and a character book with definitions, everything is explained in Alpaca itself.
To use a character simply create a new chat, select the model and then press the
Use Characterbutton!Ollama Manager
Video Demo
Starting with Alpaca 9 the Flatpak extensions (Ollama and ROCm) are going to be deprecated in favor of the brand new Ollama Manager!
When you create / select an Ollama (Managed) instance, Alpaca is going to check if Ollama is installed inside the Flatpak sandbox (not extension), if it isn't installed, Alpaca will prompt you to install it, but instead of leading you to a tutorial it will do the whole job itself!
Once Ollama is installed and the instance is working you can access the brand new Ollama Manager!
Just press the new button in the instance row to open the dialog.
From here you can:
There's also a new option in the preferences dialog to check Ollama updates automatically
This means you can have the latest version of Ollama installed the moment it comes out without having to wait for me to release it to the extensions!
Global Search
There's now an option to include messages when searching for chats in a folder, this means you can lookup a chat even if you do not remember the name of it.
New Starter Guide
I made a new "welcome" screen for new users, this time it will always show if you launch Alpaca with no instances, I think it explains better the concept of instances and models.
It also creates the first instance directly, if the user chooses to use an Ollama (Managed) instance it doesn't show the create instance dialog, making it as frictionless as possible.
Extension Removal Dialog
Since Alpaca 9 removes compatibility with the existing extensions, this dialog will popup if it detects the Ollama extension, please remove the extensions, they won't work moving forward and will be marked as EOL on Flathub.
Details
These are some additional changes that don't really need explanations or screenshots.
Fixes
Thanks to everyone for your feedback and reports, I'll continue to look into all the bugs and random crashes that popup from time to time.
I hope you guys enjoy the first update of 2026!
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