>I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. If it had a resonable price, many people would continue to use it indeterminately.
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.
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
I've been working with Lazarus on a daily basis for a while now (I work at a mostly Delphi company, but our server code runs on Linux so we write it in Lazarus). Can't say I have the same problems as you do. My host is a ubuntu machine, and I did install the latest version from their website, not from the package manager. This seemed to fix most of my issues with Lazarus.
Ah sorry about that; I am in China and internet is very slow & often broken (HN is very fast though). Probably the image did not (fully) upload. It was an error telling the application crashed. Just the empty default form after pressing run.