Still, you need to install and run the AppImage at least once to enable the "lms" cli which can later be used. Would be nice with a completely GUI-less installation/use method too.

The UI is the product. If you just want the engine, use mlx-omni-server (for MLX) or llama-swap (for GGUF) and huggingface-cli (for model downloads).

Those don't offer the same features as LM Studio itself does, even when you don't consider the UI. If there was a "LM Engine" CLI I could install, then yeah, but there isn't, hence the need to run the UI once to get "the engine".

I haven't used this and maybe it doesn't solve the problem you're describing, but might be worth looking at.

https://github.com/lmstudio-ai/lms

https://lmstudio.ai/docs/cli