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I've tried a few flavors of Linux - SuSe, RedHat, Mandrake. Also worked with other UNIXen systems - Sun, IBM, HP. I also use Win2k server and WinXP on a daily basis. Point being: I'm not a newbie.

I purchased SuSE 7.3 pro a few months back. Prior to that I was a RedHat guy - from 5.2 forward. I initially liked SuSE because it seemed more "together" of a system. But the difficulties updating the system (flaky update servers in the USA) and its Euro-centric customer base brought me back to Red Hat.

I download it, burn the CDs and am happy. Currently have a Pentium 200 (no pro, no mmx) running my web and mail server right here in the house. I only reboot once a month and usually it's because the DSL network has an outage and I use the downtime to let the system cool off for a bit and reboot my router.

Redhat - It will be around for a while, it's a solid distribution, installation is a breeze, good tech support, excellent updates for free.

Your initial question about the best version of perl and linux is moot. Perl will run on any distro of linux you select. So, pick your distro and update the perl binaries when you need to, in case the distro doesn't have the latest perl package when you want/need it.

Does that help?