However, not a single application coming from Turbo Delphi uses it unless you use the .NET enabled version.
Umm... I said exactly that in my post. Unlike the Delphi itself, the programs you create with it run in Linux without any problems (well, unless you use some obscure WinAPI function).

It took me some 10 tries to add a search path to the library so I could include an external source package. Yeah, it finally worked, but by the time I was done I wanted to kick it.
:x Well, there are some... ahem... downsides... But when you get used to use build scripts where you state the paths explicitly, and become a Pascal guru in general (just a few years of sweat) such matters stop being a concern.

In my experience, Free Pascal is nice and more modern dialect, while Delphi (I used to use Turbo Explorer) seems a bit archaic with its lack of certain things like macros, QWORD type, Exit(<result>) operator, inability to perform pointer math (you need to cast types manually a lot) and plethora of other things -- mostly not critical but annoying.
Plus, soon FPC will have generics, leaving Delphi well behind.

I still don't know how to enable a conditional compile, possibly with multiple conditions.
Huh?.. Didn't -d<xxx> / {$ifdef <xxx>} work?

I don't like Vista either,
You see? You see?

but you don't have to be so damned snappy about it
But who to hate then? Cold War is over, Saddam is dead... M$ is such a convenient scapegoat you can throw rotten things at. But you're right. This is no place for such things.

1) User Friendliness
2) Ease of Use
Well... When your first experience is Turbo Pascal + MS-DOS, one somehow considers as "user friendliness" such things as ability to run your program parallelly to IDE, without the need to close it, and without the need to reboot after each raised exception.
I abandoned Delphi for FPC years ago, when it still was 1.1, and I got well used to the lack of debugger (never managed to make one work with Free Pascal) And rely to the extended logging and debug writes. These do nicely.

Plus, Lazarus is definitely more stable than Delphi, which often has strange bugs and needs to be restarted.
On the other hand, Delphi (in my experience) generates a bit faster code.