This group is heavily biased towards Strawberry. I am still using ActivePerl as do some other Monks. ActivePerl is certainly not a "standard". I don't think that Strawberry qualifies either. However, both will work just fine.

I often write code that other folks need to run on their Windows machines. Some of these folks don't know much if anything at all about Perl and aren't used to working with a command line. The ActiveState installation process on Windows is straightforward and the latest incarnations work well. With ActivePerl, I can generate an XML package file. I give my user the command to run this file and result is that my installation is "cloned" - the user now has my entire dev environment via a single step. With a pre-compiled and tested ActiveState .ppd files, the installation goes quickly - the longest part is generating the local HTML documentation files.

With ActiveState, you can install the ActiveState cpan module and this comes with the correct compiler to make "from scratch" binary compatible modules (perhaps including XS parts) to the standard distribution.

Anway just saying in some situations, ActivePerl can work out well.