Grafpup strives to provide a complete workflow for the digital artist, from beginning to end. As such along with the major graphics applications like Gimp and Inkscape you will also find a variety of support programs and extra features. Color management is enabled for all applications that support it, and there is a basic selection of color profiles included in the standard install. For those doing photographic work there is almost complete support for raw image formats via both dcraw and the ufraw plugin (both Gimp and Cinepaint), as well as the gtkam utility for directly connecting a wide variety of cameras. Scribus and Abiword take care of publishing needs, and Gutenprint provides a wide range of printer drivers.

The desktop of Grafpup aims to be extremely efficient and at the same time good looking. The desktop is based around the Openbox window manager and the Lxpanel desktop panel/taskbar. A slightly customized ROX-Filer makes file management easy and provides desktop icons. Tying all of these elements together is a full suite of custom configuration tools, wizards, and other gadgets. Most of these are graphical and use the gtk+ toolkit for a nice uniform look. Most file formats open right up in an appropriate application just by clicking on them in a filer window.

Speaking of extra packages, Grafpup comes with a pretty good package manager that resolves dependencies, and there are well over a thousand applications in the repository (and growing). These range from basic command line utilities to full office suites, audio and video production tools, and Java. Both KDE and XFCE desktops are available too.

In addition to conventional packages Grafpup is also able to load compressed modules (they have the .sfs extension) very much like SLAX does. This capability is used to package very large applications like OpenOffice, or the full development environment. Just place one of these where you have your save file located and it will be found the next time you boot up. Coming soon there will be a tool to add them in on the fly (we already had this, in a limited fashion, in Grafpup-104).

Grafpup 2.00 comes with some really bleeding edge features when compared with previous versions of Grafpup, such as a 2.6.20.2 kernel, revamped package management with dependency resolution, Gimp-2.3.14, Cinepaint-0.22 with the cvs Ufraw plug-in, a brand new control panel, cdrkit replacing cdrtools, Openbox replacing IceWM, and a host of other changes. In addition to the lightweight Openbox desktop you can also now easily download and install both XFCE4 and KDE. The software repository has blown up to include over 1100 titles (and counting).