What is the difference between Lazarus and CodeTyphon

CodeTyphon is a distro of Lazarus, like Ubuntu and Debian are distros of Linux.

CodeTyphon comes with a large package of components and plugins, that otherwise you would have to google and download and install.

CodeTyphon have their own idea what are stable versions and what are not stable yet for both of FPC (compiler) and Lazarus(IDE). Whether their assessment is better or worse than upstream's Lazarus Team's, I don't know.

What about one-single-window plugin, it is work-in-progress and it doesn't seems to me it is ready for production use, no matter would you get it as part of CT or download and add it to vanilla Lazarus. However maybe it better works on Linux than on Windows, I don't know.

There were however issues with code legality in CT grande bundle. It is widely believed that Orca (if I remember the name) violates copyrights of glScene/vgScene, which also happened in early Delphi FMX releases but was fixed by EMBA later. There also were disputes in FPC forums/wiki about CodeTyphon pirating some open-source components. See answer by Peter Dunne below.

Lazarus can be a daunting installation process due to it's nature as a cross compiling environment. You don't just download an installer and click ok. A typical "installation" is actually a bootstrap FPC compiler doing a three-pass compilation of an "install". There are plenty of good installation scripts/methods from the official Lazarus/FPC team and in the community for a . But, understandably, the installation process is a skill in itself.

CodeTyphon is a a different/separate branch of an installer system, which is more of a utility suite/tools/third party code compilation library. If you want the simplest installation experience go with CodeTyphon. It has the nice graphical front end for managing the compiler. You can conveniently do the fancy stuff like build "cross-compilers" for almost every "target" operating system out there. It also is jam packed with hundreds of the best components/libraries pre-installed. It is a very actively maintained project and very professional. A whole lot of work is done for you.

Even if you want to be learn the low level compiler capabilities, CodeTyphon is a good place to start. It is written in FCP/Lazarus and is open source. Simply study it as "working demo app" and the other info on the compiler details. If you crash it, at least you don't have to learn to climb the hill. You get to get to start from the top and lose control on the way down. Start from scratch (and a three hour reinstallation) Hahaha

Your question is akin to asking the difference between Linux and Ubuntu. Lazarus is an IDE/component library, based on FreePascal (FPC). And CodeTyphon is a distribution of Lazarus and FPC. So CodeTyphon is just one way to install a functioning installation of Lazarus.

Lazarus uses the same floating window design as older versions of Delphi. Installing from CodeTyphon won't change that.

Myself and several friends highlighted several licensing issues with codetyphon most of which could have been corrected by sourcing the included files from known good source and ensuring the correct license headers were included PirateLogic refused to correct the issues which means they are using code in direct violation of the original license terms The fact its open source code does not change the fact they are pirating the code by not including the correct license even after the issue was highlighted I also found several instances of copyright code included which appears to be proprietary and not FOSS at all They also changed the path & file names on some libraries so that source is no longer compatible with standard lazarus/component installs This in my view is totally illogical These 2 factors heavily undermine what was potentially the best FPC/Lazarus distro Hardly professional