Pardon me for replying to myself, but I have some more versions for the list.

Puppy

Unsurprisingly, Core Linux 2.0 (no relation to Fedora or Fedora Core), being a tiny distribution meant to provide just a boot-strap installation of Linux upon which you can install everything else doesn't provide a perl.

I'm surprised I haven't noticed Debian mentioned. I had 5.0.6 handy, so I can tell you it ships with 5.10.0 as its system perl.

I dug out some older Linux distro CDs I have for some perspective, even though I'm aware you mentioned "recent".

On my (commercial, bought shrink-wrapped, so don't sue me, Darl) Caldera 2.3 disks from 1999, I found 5.5.2 (or as it was know then, 5.005_02).

Red Hat 7.1 (not RHEL, but back before Fedora and RHEL when it was all just Red Hat Linux) from 2001 had 5.6.0 in the ISOs.

I've been using Mandriva as at least one of my Linux distros since version 6.0 first came out. I have enough data to put together another Mandrake/Mandriva table for some of the versions not listed in the one above.

As usual for Mandriva, the vendor_perl directory for some of the above contains some modules from earlier editions. Perl plays a central role in much of Mandriva's package management and configuration management tools, so they tend to do what is necessary with their system perl to make Perl really stable for their needs. I suggest installing a second perl under /usr/local on Mandriva, BTW, for exactly this reason. It's not a bad idea to leave the system's perl alone on most platforms that ship with one, but on Mandriva you can really hose your system if you mess up, say, urpmi by fiddling with the system perl.

I don't seem to have Xandros or NimbleX any newer than 2007. I have some earlier Ubuntu versions not mentioned yet by others, but they aren't exactly recent either.