I have an AMD cpu, there are loads of AMD cpus without IGP, both current and older generations, recent Intel cpus without IGP are far less common but they do exist too.

Didn't know that there were amd or intel cpus that had no integrated graphics cards in them.

@steve_v Current GPU is using less than 5w, while writing this and doing general desktop stuff. When I want performance... You get what you pay for (in watts).

I don't understand obsessing over idle power consumption, particularly when it's on-par with a network card or additional SSD.

Fair enough, I didn't realize that the power usage was thatt low. I wonder how much it uses when nvidia is the graphics card being used though.

His whole post is very interesting and well worth reading, it gives a good insight into the very active development of XLibre, he says they are already a team of 10 permanent developers working on XLibre. To me it sounds like Xlibre has a bright and long future in front of it!

The post is in German so if you don't understand German run it through a translator such as DeepL.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are some Nvidia Devs involved or at least collaborating in the background with XLibre since Nvidia has always shown a preference for X11 rather than Wayland.

I don't use nvidia, because the drivers are a constant source of aggravation...

I keep reading this and I certainly don't want to doubt other people's experiences,  but personally I have never had problems with them, on the contrary they have been very stable and reliable for me so far, and I'm using Nvidia GPUs under Linux since around 2007 or so, exactly because of my good experience with them.
I have to add that the newest Nvidia card that I use is a GTX 1050, maybe the problems are specific to more recent generations of GPUs?
Also I'm not a gamer (except for very occasionally playing some older FOSS games), maybe the problems are mostly with commercial games?

what kind of cpu do you have? I thought intel and amd both had their own individual graphics card functionality built in.

I have an AMD cpu, there are loads of AMD cpus without IGP, both current and older generations, recent Intel cpus without IGP are far less common but they do exist too.

I don't use nvidia either...

I don't use nvidia, because the drivers are a constant source of aggravation... Much as ATI drivers used to be. How the tables have turned.

Because IGPU is too slow, lacks features, or is absent entirely?

Current GPU is using less than 5w, while writing this and doing general desktop stuff. When I want performance... You get what you pay for (in watts).

I don't understand obsessing over idle power consumption, particularly when it's on-par with a network card or additional SSD.

Depends on SKU, both have options with and without an IGPU.

Here are a few links-
https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=163451
https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=163515
https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=163469
https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=163655

There are many more. It kept me busy just reading these each day looking for an answer to installing nvidia. I never did get it to work, however. I didn't know Trixie also came with the 535 drivers. Since the 550 was such a problem I started looking around at other distros to see what was going on there. It looks like Debian was the only one having a problem. Most of the distros I checked out were running either the 570 or 580 drivers at the time...but they were working just fine. It's not nvidia that has the problem. Debian itself made some changes (like leaving out dkms).

I tend to think, myself, why bother having an additional graphics card.

Well in my case the Nvidia card isn't additional, it's the only graphics card in the PC, as the CPU doesn't have an IGP.

Debian Trixie ships with the 550 drivers.

Well it ships with both the 535 and the 550 drivers to choose from, hence this thread.

Could you please post some links to the main threads you are referring to? I had a quick look but couldn't find anything apart from a few short threads about some edge cases (problems with wayland, old unsupported cards, ...).

As I wrote in the previous message I chose to install the 535 drivers on Devuan Excalibur and they are working fine, no issues so far, NVdec, VDPAU and opengl all work as expected with the applications I tested. Still have to test NVenc with handbrake. The only thing I couldn't get working yet is VAAPI, but that seems to be an issue of the nvidia-vaapi-driver package which isn't part of the official nvidia drivers.

Maybe the debian 13 problems with nvidia are a consequence of systemd?