Did you try it? I try it every year (I was a Delphi fan and full time Delphi programmer from Delph-1 to 6) but it is not very good. The Pascal compiler is brilliant and fast but Lazarus itself is unusable every time I try. It often begins by failing to build the basic form until I go through a bunch of steps to fix the install. That's going to put most people off as Delphi never had that issue; it was install-and-go. And after that it depends a bit on the position of the moon what happens. For instance, I just installed it again because of your post and when I press Run, I get http://imgur.com/a/blFNC . But even when you have it running, it keeps being highly unstable. Maybe it's just me but I doubt it.