Perl and Windows

I've decided that Perl isn't up to scratch when used on a Windows environment. The lack of support for catalyst for windows is something that crossed my mind in the past. But now I've discovered how crap activestate's ppm (perl package manager) really is. I could hardly find any packages with images (let alone the right one). On further googling, it appears for example, GD (one of the main perl graphics packages) is not available on the activestate repository for whatever reason. This is discussed here