what would be better to use in Windows: Active or Strawberry Perl?

"Better" by what criteria?

• Active State is easier to get started and will do pretty much all you need as a beginner.

  It comes with many useful and sometimes imperative Wndows modules preinstalled and configured, and makes huge numbers of other modules that you will need as your experience grows, available for 'one-click' installation via PPM.

• Strawberry Perl's main claim to fame is that it theoretically makes it easier to install some modules that have a compiled component.

  In practice, most of the modules you will want as a beginner or indeed intermediate Perler, are available as a 'one-click' install for Active State anyway.

  Those modules that aren't so available, are the 'awkward squad' of compiled modules that have complex dependencies requiring the separate download and building of additional C libraries from 3rd party sources. And/or they have *nix platform code assumptions that need *nix expertise to resolve before the dependant Perl module will build on Windows.

  In my brief trial of Strawberry Perl, I found that those compiled modules it would install directly without manual intervention, would also install on Active State if you had a compiler correctly set up.

  And those that wouldn't install on Active State with compiler, also failed on Strawberry Perl until some manual interventions had been applied. Interventions that are frequently beyond my expertise to resolve.

As a result, I remain an unashamed Active State Perl user.