The one negative I've found with Lazarus... And this is purely if you were someone coming from a Delphi background, or were planning on Lazarus being your "get out of jail free" card if [Embarcadero/(whoever owns it now)] decides to stop updating Delphi (and even then you could probably manage it's lack of updates for years, hell I stayed on Delphi 2007 for a good 8 or 9 years after XE, XE1, XE2 et al had been out).. Anyways, back to my point, the one major negative I've found with Lazarus is you simply can not take Delphi code, and compile it straight in Lazarus... There are many many many very subtle differences. Totally fine and understandable, but if you were planning on taking the attitude of "Stuff Delphi, lets take our 400k line project and move to Lazarus", you are going to have a bad time.

Having said that I've done a couple of my own projects at home in Lazarus. It's fine, it feels dated, going back to the original Delphi / VB style of RAD tool with form designer/code editor as floating windows etc. The intellisense leaves something to be desired, but I can't be too critical because it's not like I'm putting my hand up to contribute to the project. If you look at what you get for what you pay for, it's quite literally amazing.