An expected software update on a slow day at the end of December is hardly big breaking news. But for start-up company Boxee, it signals a shift away from its software for PC browsers and a focus on Internet-connected TVs: The company says version 1.5 of the software will be its last Boxee update for PCs, Ubuntu and Mac computers.

It will be launched along with a Live TV dongle for the Boxee Box later in January.

Version 1.5 of the downloadable software on the Web will include better file support, a new onscreen display, search functionality, HTML5 WebKit-based browser, and will support multiple languages. It will run on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 (32 bit and 64 bit), Mac OS X 10.6 and higher, Linux Ubuntu 11.10, and will be available on Boxee.tv through the end of January.

And for those who would rather develop their own software for Boxee: The company is also releasing an open source version of its software.

The update won’t, however, offer PC users access to the same apps that are available on the Box, such as Netflix, Pandora and VUDU.

Boxee first launched in January 2010 as a Web application for watching Internet video online. In November 2010, it launched its awaited Boxee Box device, which came with a nifty Qwerty-style remote and offered a variety of apps — but it launched amid a growing market of Internet-connected TV boxes, including Apple TV, Google TV, Microsoft’s Xbox and the competitively-priced Roku box. At the time of the Boxee’s hardware launch, about 1.5 million people were using the Boxee software.

Boxee explained its shift away from Web software by saying it believes the future of TV will be driven by Internet-connected boxes, connected TVs and second screen devices like tablets. “While there are still many users who have computers connected to their TVs, we believe this use case is likely to decline as users find better alternatives,” Boxee wrote.

The company also said that the lack of premium apps on the downloadable version of Boxee was due to extensive DRM and certification requirements.

Anso Labs is helmed by Jesse Andrews, the former lead architect at Flock, the Web-browser company that was recently acquired by Zynga, and Soo Choi, a former exec at Booz Allen Hamilton. Anso Labs is best known for its work on the cloud computing front with NASA, the U.S. space agency.

The move takes place against the backdrop of a surge in consolidation in the cloud computing and data center business. Last week, Time Warner Cable dropped $230 million for NaviSite. And on Jan. 28, Verizon acquired Terremark for $1.4 billion. That one-two punch in data center deal-making has led to persistent speculation that other data center companies, Rackspace among them, will be rolled up by larger companies–like Hewlett-Packard, Dell or Cisco Systems–that are eager to add cloud services to their portfolio.

Ask Rackspace executives about this–and I have–and they’ll tell you they’re not thinking about that. Rather than being rolled up by someone else, they’re focused on rolling up the assets they want to grow, and to remain independent. Late last year Rackspace acquired Cloudkick, a start-up focused on building cloud monitoring tools.

Rackspace did $629 million in revenue in 2009, and is expected to show annual sales of about $775 million when it reports fourth-quarter earnings tomorrow. It has 100,000 customers, and while many of them are small- and medium-size businesses, larger enterprise customers like Coca-Cola, Target and Vodaphone are tapping Rackspace for Web hosting and to run their cloud applications.

Rackspace wants Anso Labs for its expertise and devotion to OpenStack, an open-source cloud computing software project backed by Rackspace, Dell, Citrix, Cisco and Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu flavor of Linux.

Rackspace wants to create a bunch of inter-operable cloud services so that customers can move workload from one cloud service provider to another at will, giving them increased flexibility. It’s comparable in some ways to vCloud from VMware and Eucalyptus.

His latest effort is SnapLogic, which last week landed a $10 million round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Floodgate Ventures participating.

SnapLogic’s approach to making applications work together is simple. The company has created a common interchange format that gets two or more applications–say, for example, Salesforce.com and ExactTarget–to work together. In both cases, a company can buy “snaps” that get those applications running in the SnapLogic server. Snaps are SnapLogic-ready applications that are available in the company’s own SnapStore.

Before SnapLogic, you could certainly integrate these applications yourself, but not without a lot of heavy programming work. “It can be hard but not impossible,” Dhillon told me. “People often inadvertently paint themselves into a corner. They say, let’s connect these two, and then six months later they want to add NetSuite, and then later they buy another company that runs its own set of applications.”

Dhillon compares the SnapLogic server to a common shipping container. “The shipping industry uses the same container on ships, trains and trucks, and it makes transportation very efficient.” (Investor Ben Horowitz has called Dhillon “the Metaphor King.”) Using the SnapLogic approach allows different applications to fit together inside the same container and share information. So far there are 63 supported apps and some 2,000 supported combinations.

And if that’s not enough, there’s also has an API, so if you have custom applications for which a “snap” isn’t already built, you can roll your own. “Most companies are going to have some element of homegrown software,” he said.

Customers so far include Pandora, Canonical–the company behind Ubuntu Linux–and OSI Restaurant Partners, which owns Outback Steakhouse. ING, the Dutch financial services company, is also running a small installation, Dhillon said.

He thinks of integration as his life’s work, which was only partially started at Informatica. “I have a feeling like there’s this unfinished business I want to tend to.”

Linux on netbooks isn’t going away though. In fact, software and hardware companies have been making big investments to improve Linux netbooks. For the past week, I’ve been using several flavors of Linux running on netbooks — Ubuntu, Hewlett-Packard’s Mi (which is based on Ubuntu) and Moblin, created largely by Intel and not yet available commercially. In all cases, the Linux netbooks failed at some basic functions that any laptop, no matter how tiny and inexpensive, should be able to handle, like working with printers. At the same time, Mi and Moblin have impressive graphical user interfaces well-suited to the habits of typical netbook users, like checking email and accessing social-networking sites, as well as the small screens and low horsepower of tiny laptops. In addition to Linux, all of the computers shared the standard features, or lack thereof, common among netbooks, including compact keyboards and no DVD drives.

H-P’s Mini 110 Mi Edition

The most polished of the products was H-P’s Mini 110 Mi Edition, a new model with a 10.1-inch screen that H-P will begin selling on its Web site for $279.99 on June 10. That’s nearly $50 less than what H-P will charge for the Mini 110 running Windows XP, which will come with a 160-gigabyte hard drive instead of the 8-gigabyte solid-state drive that will come with the Mi edition.

The striking thing about this netbook is the slick graphical user interface created by H-P that runs on top of Ubuntu and first began appearing on H-P netbooks early this year. Instead of a traditional desktop like that found in Windows and the Mac, Mi (pronounced “me”) arranges commonly used applications and content on a screen called the “dashboard,” which looks like a personalized Web page and lists recently received emails, fresh thumbnail images of favorite Web sites, and a Web-search toolbar.

The Mi home screen is a clever way to make the computer seem alive with on- and off-line content, which is fitting since netbooks are designed for on-the-go Internet activities. It’s also tailor-made for the small screen size of netbooks.

A more eye-catching iteration of Linux is Moblin, which I tried out in test form on an Acer netbook; it is expected to ship on netbooks by the end of the year. Moblin has a menu of icons at the top of the screen, the most interesting of which leads to the M-Zone, a home screen that displays calendar appointments and favorite applications alongside snapshots of recently visited sites and a continuous feed from the user’s Twitter network.

An icon called “People” leads to a list of instant-messaging buddies, while another, called “Zones,” let me organize all the applications I had launched into different virtual workspaces, which is useful for hopping between various tasks on a small-screen device like a netbook.

The look and feel of the standard Ubuntu system, without the Mi interface, is more commonplace. I tried out a Dell Mini 10 with a 10.1-inch display and 160-gigabyte hard drive that sells for $349 on Dell’s Web site. The Mini 10 ships with version 8.04 of Ubuntu, which resembles Windows XP, with its desktop, taskbar and pop-up menu system. Ubuntu, in some cases, seemed to overestimate the size of the Dell Mini’s display: A window for configuring wireless-networking capabilities was so large it bled off the screen, and I couldn’t access all the buttons on it. I also installed on the Dell a new version of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which works better on small screens. Since a Windows XP version of the Dell Mini 10 sells for the same price as the Ubuntu, I can’t see a compelling reason to choose the Ubuntu option.

All the netbooks I tried had compatibility problems with other external devices. The netbooks couldn’t load the software drivers to let me print to my Canon and Dell printers. I couldn’t load pictures over a USB cable from my Canon PowerShot SD750 digital camera. I was able to get my pictures on the machines by plugging a storage card from my camera directly into the netbooks.

Canonical, the London company that oversees development work on Ubuntu, says it is improving the system’s compatibility with various devices. Intel says it is unfair to judge Moblin until it is commercially available.

Some key applications currently don’t run on Linux, like Apple’s iTunes, which makes it difficult to load music files onto iPods from the netbooks. While the Linux laptops didn’t run Microsoft Office, they came with OpenOffice, a free package of word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications that allowed me to open and modify basic Word and Excel files.

The companies behind Linux netbooks have made great strides in improving user interfaces, but until they can achieve similar breakthroughs in how the machines work with other devices, Windows netbooks are still a better deal.

• Email nick.wingfield@wsj.com. Walter S. Mossberg is away and will return next Thursday.

So, I have steered away from recommending Linux, the free computer operating system that is the darling of many techies and IT managers, and a challenger to Microsoft’s dominant Windows and Apple’s resurgent Macintosh operating system, OS X. Linux, which runs on the same hardware as Windows, has always required much more technical expertise and a yen for tinkering than average users possess.

Lately, however, I’ve received a steady stream of emails from readers urging me to take a look at a variant of Linux called Ubuntu, which, these folks claimed, is finally polished enough for a mainstream user to handle. My interest increased when Dell began to sell a few computer models preloaded with Ubuntu instead of Windows.

I’ve been testing one of those Dell Ubuntu computers, a laptop called the Inspiron 1420N. I evaluated it strictly from the point of view of an average user, someone who wouldn’t want to enter text commands, hunt the Web for drivers and enabling software, or learn a whole new user interface. I focused on Ubuntu and the software programs that come bundled with it, not on the hardware, which is a pretty typical Dell laptop.

My verdict: Even in the relatively slick Ubuntu variation, Linux is still too rough around the edges for the vast majority of computer users. While Ubuntu looks a lot like Windows or Mac OS X, it is full of little complications and hassles that will quickly frustrate most people who just want to use their computers, not maintain or tweak them.

Before every passionate Linux fan attacks that conclusion, let me note that even the folks who make and sell Ubuntu agree with it. Mark Shuttleworth, the South African-born founder of the Ubuntu project, told me this week that “it would be reasonable to say that this is not ready for the mass market.” And Dell’s Web site for its Ubuntu computers warns that these machines are for “for advanced users and tech enthusiasts.”

So, what do I mean when I say Ubuntu is too rough around the edges for average users? Here are some examples.

There is no control panel for adjusting the way the touch pad works, and I found it so sensitive that I was constantly launching programs and opening windows accidentally by touching the thing. Every time the computer awoke from sleep, the volume control software crashed and had to be reloaded.

When I tried to play common audio and video files, such as MP3 songs, I was told I had to first download special files called codecs that are built into Windows and Mac computers. I was warned that some of these codecs might be “bad” or “ugly.”

To get the computer to recognize my Kodak camera and Apple iPod, I had to reboot it several times. When it did find the iPod, it wasn’t able to synchronize with it. Playing videos was a bad experience, with lots of flickering and freezing. Oh, and there’s no built-in software for playing commercial DVDs.

The Ubuntu-equipped Inspiron 1420N starts at $744, but the configuration that Dell lent me for testing sells for $1,415. The same unit equipped with Windows Vista costs $1,524. The Ubuntu version includes OpenOffice, the free office suite that competes with Microsoft Office. Dell charges an added $149 for Microsoft Office.

Ubuntu and other versions of Linux have several advantages. Unlike Windows and OS X, they’re free. Unlike Mac OS X, they can be run on the least-expensive popular hardware configurations. Unlike Windows, but like the Mac, they are essentially free of viruses and spyware. And unlike Windows and Mac OS X, they are built and constantly improved by a world-wide network of developers, professional and amateur — the so-called open-source concept that produced the excellent Firefox Web browser.

It makes sense that all the best software brains can’t be located in just two places: Redmond, Wash., where Microsoft is based, and Cupertino, Calif., Apple’s base. And plenty of people reading this have had lots of frustrations with the two better-known operating systems, especially Windows, whose latest iteration, Vista, is disappointing in many ways.

But open source is a two-edged sword. While it draws on smart developers from many places, nobody is ultimately responsible for the quality of the product, and open-source developers often have an imperfect feel for how average people use software. A European company called Canonical is the “commercial sponsor” of Ubuntu and provides support. But it’s largely focused on corporate and techie users. Average Ubuntu users are likely to have to wade through online forums, often written in technical language, to get help.

Dell and Canonical tell me there are complex workarounds for some of the problems I encountered, and that built-in improvements are planned for others. But for now, I still advise mainstream, nontechnical users to avoid Linux.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Anyway, the move will likely be viewed with some distaste by the Linux community, which has denounced the Novell-Microsoft deal as a sort of Hitler-Stalin alliance against Oracle and Red Hat or, worse, as undermining the open-source movement by pitting one Linux distributor–Novell–against the rest of the Linux community.

Anyway, the move will likely be viewed with some distaste by the Linux community, which has denounced the Novell-Microsoft deal as a sort of Hitler-Stalin alliance against Oracle and Red Hat or, worse, as undermining the open-source movement by pitting one Linux distributor–Novell–against the rest of the Linux community.