I've tested old Delphi versions and they were a joy to use under WINE. For the more adventurous, years ago there was a"special" version of Delphi 7 around call

I've tested old Delphi versions and they were a joy to use under WINE. For the more adventurous, years ago there was a"special" version of Delphi 7 around called like "Delphi 7.2 second edition" which essentially was to plain Delphi what the "ultra lite" versions of the OS were to XP back then: the author removed all the cruft, applied lots of optimizations here and there making the compiler a lot faster and the entire package much smaller. If memory serves, the entire installation file was less than 50MB. It literally flied on old machines. Was it legal? Definitely not, but it was probably safe; when installed on Windows it didn't trigger any AV.