I have been struggling with Lazarus for 2 months now. I use a Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu 18.04, 8 Gb RAM, 500 Gb hard drive.
I have several years' experience with BCB ^, a delight to use. And with Microsoft Visual studio, horribly overblown, with hopscotch documentation (i.e. every sentence sends you hopping to another link).
Now with FP and lazarus, all i want to do at present is write a couple of programs accessing MariaDB databases using a GUI, and designing the forms at design time, not coding them at run time. As I understand things, that's the whole purpose of RAD, and Borland did that very well.
But with lazarus, i can't find good documentation anywhere. As one example: I want to design grids, both data-linked and not, and I want to design them at design time. where is the documentation? The documentation that seems most complete is this: Michaël Van Canneyt - Free Pascal Reference guide, version 3.0.2 (2017). However - try looking up the TDBstringGrid in it. When you have failed at that, just give up and look up 'grid'. I got 2 hits in the whole 3700+ pages, neither of them relevant or helpful.
When i try to design the grid, i find that you can do some things such as lay out the columns in the column editor - but the layout does not carry over to the grid you are trying to edit. in any case, why do you have to click in a half-dozen different places to achieve one simple task? Perhaps somewhere there is a tutorial, but who can tell?
I think that a free, open-source RAD package along the lines of Delphi is a good idea. Perhaps a group of people can get together, develop one, and then tell everyone about it, how to get it, and how to use it.