I wish this post had replies. I've been hoping for similar information. I've been using Perplexity Pro, which has several engines available. It's been extremel

I wish this post had replies. I've been hoping for similar information. I've been using Perplexity Pro, which has several engines available. It's been extremely frustrating with vast oscillations in quality; many prompts are completely ignored; the output has seemingly degraded in intelligence and quality; any work with files leads to loops of stupidity; and customer support ignores most support requests. I tried Gemini (free version) through an API and it's terrible so far. On a positive note, Perplexity has, when not malfunctioning, been surprisingly helpful in writing Python code for various tasks. But all the frustrations, canned ethics and inane "safety" features have me wanting a more tunable and effective option and this is where everything gets pretty confusing and convoluted for me. Google's AI are clearly priced, with token caching, cloud, etc and other options, but I still find it confusing as well as expect the cost to exceed what I'd get in comparison to Perplexity or OpenAI. I'm in my third week of exploring all this and still quite ignorant and dumbfounded. Edit: I should add that making this endeavor maximally difficult, I am doing my best to not install anything from beyond the repositories for my Linux distro. Otherwise I would require, open source, a pgp signature and an established user base.