Installing Lazarus from the package managers in Linux really does suck even today, I wish they would fix it or just remove it from those repositories.

I Finally got the Linux version running on Mint by downloading and installing the files from their repository as recommended and it was a nice experience after that

Windows is another matter entirely, just download the setup, run it and go

Lazarus is a very active project, currently I rate it up there with delphi XE2 (the version I use currently) and it can only improve