Ok all, I found an easy way to run Anki as a normal user with different interfaces. It took way too much research for such a simple solution. :P

I found my solution in the Qt documentation here under the "Member Function Documentation" section.

The solution? Simply run anki from the command line with the -style option and specify one of the default supported styles which according to that document include motif, windows and platinum.

An example:

"anki -style motif"

results in an interface like this:



I haven't run into any problems yet running this way - though I certainly haven't put it through heavy use.

Edit: Additional styles available with the version of PyQt4 that I have: Plastique, GTK+, Maemo5, and Cleanlooks

Edit2: I'll note that after trying all the styles I've decided that I like Motif the best. It's not necessarily the most visibly pleasing but it seems to handle the exploded main menu the best when the list of items gets very long. It would be nice if the main menu would maintain the categorization used on desktop versions of Anki instead of merging everything into one long list.