Currently, there are only two graphical scales for Sugar: 72 (smaller elements) and 100 (larger elements). I guess that there is still enough bitmaps or hand-tuning that you can't just scale your whole gtk theme with impunity. The choice between these scales is made with $SUGAR_SCALING , which is set by the startup script (bin/sugar or bin/sugar-soas). How should we decide? There are three (well, 4) relevant variables: dpi (technically, v and h are separate, but these are typically close), screen width in cm, screen height in cm. The combination of these gives screen width in pixels, screen height in pixels. The possibilities of [pixels, correct $SUGAR_SCALING] as I see them are in the table below: min(width in cm/4,height in cm/3): low high dpi low [few,72] [normal,100] high [normal,100] [many,100] in other words, we should choose 72 when there are few pixels. I've submitted a patch to do this (when hres<900 or vres <700) to <a href="http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/39">http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/39</a>. The patch covers sugar, but not sugar-soas, which uses a dpi cutoff. Please discuss.