My own take on this, in addition to what others have said:

If you haven't even looked at the error messages, you might be abandoning Perl without reason. It might be something really stupid or easy, an error in the first test, that led to all the other tests failing. A module will (almost) never fail all tests without a very good reason which can normally be traced easily. Maybe a permissions problem, or a web server problem, etc.

On most of the systems I have used (including many RedHat/Debian/SuSE/Slackware Linux machines, some Windows NT4/2K/XP machines, some OSX machines and even Debian running on an Alpha machine), CPAN worked almost flawlessly. On Windows, of course, I needed to do some homework to install everything needed to compile and install modules with XS code correctly. But that's to be expected. And once that was done, even modules that hadn't been tested on Windows worked.

You say OSX and Fedora are the most used Unices? I tend to disagree. Apple still has a very small share of the hardware in the world, so I can dismiss that one easily. And Fedora is, IMHO, still too young to have the following you think it has. However, since I have not tried Perl on Fedora, I cannot assume that Fedora itself is your problem. You'll have to investigate that... And do come back to report your findings here! (maybe create an account, so that we can tell it's you :-)

Anyways, whatever you decide, good luck to you. If Perl is your favourite as you say, I hope you'll try and get your stuff working instead of just using another language. I can't help but think that would be giving up too easily...

Again, good luck.