Thanks for the suggestions. I was kind of worried about the screenshots, myself. I'll add forward/back clickies.

Actually, we're pretty much with you on the "show people what's happening" train, though we don't always show the command being executed (it's often not actually commands, but processing of configuration files and such--restarting services is a tiny part of what we do), we do generally show the command line output of the commands we run. So, restarting a service does give you back the results from the initscript.

And to go further on that theme, my book (published by No Starch in '03 and now combined with Jamie's book from the Bruce Perens Open Source series and online for free at http://doxfer.com/Webmin) is pretty heavily focused on connecting up the GUI to the command line. We're not into hocus pocus and hiding the system from the user--our interest is in making it easier to get things done right fast.

I'll also mention that Virtualmin is based on Webmin, which is religious about being polite to command line editing of configuration files. You can twist your httpd.conf into a tiny little ball and toss it in a corner, and as long as the syntax is valid, Webmin will deal with it correctly. It respects comments, the order of the file, and won't overwrite your changes (except where it has been told to do so). It is a wholly different kind of product than Plesk or cPanel (which are pretty much all-or-nothing, and don't permit anyone else to touch the config files). Webmin's got over 300,000 lines of code to deal with all of that stuff correctly...nobody else even tries.

But, now I'm talking too much. ;-)

Thanks again for your thoughts.