If a distro installs Lazarus but doesn't install its developer dependencies I'd argue that it's a distro-level problem.
As standard on Debian, I install these in preparation for building FPC
build-essential
gdb
subversion
libncursesw5-dev
libncurses5-dev
libgpm-dev
as well as possibly libpq-dev etc., and these for Lazarus
libgtk2.0-dev
libqt4pas-dev
libqt5pas-dev
and that's about it.
MarkMLl