I've seen people annoyed at ReiserFS, but some people say it's better. Which is true and why?

most users will never notice any real difference between their two likely cohoices of filesytem, ext3 and reisferfs. both do journalling and work very well, however as life sucks, both can break in theory. people that moan about reiserfs are more than likely to have just been unlucky enough to have a bad experience. 70% of my partitions are reiserfs now, the rest on ext3, and they are both fine in my opinion. Reiserfs is a lot newer than the core of ext3 which is based upon the existing ext2 non-journalling code, so theoretically you should get better performance fronm reiserfs with large numbers of files, but none that you are honestly likely to notice on a normal system.

I agree with acid_kewpie, I use ReiserFS for anything but the root partition, and I never notice a difference from ext2 / ext3, but there's one thing I should say:

I once screwed up a reiserfs-partition with 3500 mp3's. Well, I didn't, Windows did I think, since it don't understands reiserfs and don't understands I want it to keep it f*lthy hands of it, but anyway, my partition-table disappeared, and I'd to recover the partition.
It had to rebuild it file-tree from scratch, wich for some files failed, and they were lost.

Not a great problem, but the recovering tool (reiserfsck) was kinda like beta.
So finally I lost 500 mp3s and wondered if I'd still have them if I'd used ext3.

Ditto here. My main distro is Slack, and my secondary distro is Suse, and both of them use reiserfs as the default file system. From my point of view, if Patrick thinks reiser is the right choice to use with Slack, I'm sure as heck not going to argue with him. Just my 2 cents -- J.W.