Has anyone here used Lazarus? It looks great from its description but I'd be interested in an independent opinion.

Yeah i use it for many years. The language is good, not free of warts, but does the job perfectly fine. The IDE might be a bit confusing at a first glance, but it is easy to figure out and it is so responsive it puts every other IDE to shame (consider that it runs and is usable on an original Raspberry Pi - which AFAIK has the equivalent power of a 300MHz PC). But the crown is the LCL/FCL (the VCL equivalent) framework with its tight integration with the IDE and visual designer (which you can use not just for GUI forms, but for creating actions, non-visual objects, collections, etc though obviously most of the focus has been on the GUI designer).

Here is a simple tool i wrote in a couple of days in Lazarus:

http://runtimeterror.com/tools/bugs/

Also here are a couple of other applications i've written with it:

http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/

http://runtimeterror.com/tools/lila/

I've written some other stuff too, like this graph editor:

https://i.imgur.com/S2qTuU1.png

or this 3D world editor:

https://i.imgur.com/s0GaK0A.png

https://i.imgur.com/316SmAh.png

or these two tools for creating bump maps and combining meshes to create textures:

https://i.imgur.com/RaZQz68.png

...but those are run-of-the-mill tools that i haven't available anywhere. Also i have a bunch of other tools i do not have screenshots of and there might be some other stuff on the server i do not remember :-P.

I am currently using Lazarus for an open source project. I develop and test in Windows and Linux. Lazarus is feature rich and quite stable (barring a few minor exceptions). Package installation can be quirky, but you can live with that. The IDE is reasonably capable in code traversal and refactoring. If you are comfortable with Object Pascal and if you are targetting the desktop platform, definitely worth a go.

It was a pretty good IDE when I was using it slightly over a decade ago...

Lazarus gives you rich, visual, native, multiplatform (OSX, Linux, Windows) GUI applications for free. I think also Android (and iOS?), but haven't checked.

If you like Delphi, you'll like Lazarus.

However, in my personal opinion, Pascal has not really kept up with the sort of creature comforts that nowadays even C++ affords the programmer. The IDE (Delphi or Lazarus) also don't provide the kind of help Eclipse gives you when using Java, even though Pascal may feel as verbose sometimes.