Qwen3 is by far the best for this
Discussion
I did succeed in getting qwen3 to call tools, but it needs a lot of handholding to make it keep going.
How did you use it? With goose? Which model size? It normally starts to work well from 7b, and benefits a lot from a good system prompt explaining how it can interact with tools, etc. In Goose, this is managed automatically and you cannot modify the system prompt.