It seems to me that the two contender distributions are, indeed, those that have been named, and that the two distributors take a slightly different approach ... both valid.   ActiveState is very much a turn-key solution that doesn’t require you to know terribly much about Perl if you don’t happen to know much (yet).   Strawberry seems to be targeted more for the person who is already familiar with Perl, i.e. from a Unix/Linux background.

Once you get the packages unwrapped and the pretty paper cleaned up off the floor, both are strong.   (Of course they are ... they’re Perl ...)

I have found that Win32 works just fine as a foundation for Perl, although (until “Power Shell” came along) it (Windows, that is...) had a wretched (read:   non-existent) command-line.   ((I) love (parentheses).)