Ext3 as a default file system

I’ve been wondering why my friends told me to use the ext3 filesystem when I installed Linux. At the time, I didn’t really understand. Why should I choose ext3? And why should you?

• ext3 is stable
• ext3 is sufficient for most desktop computing needs
• ext3 is well-supported

I think that by default, most installaions of distributions use ext3. I guess that people sometimes get tempted to try out other file systems. I asked one of my friends about XFS and Reiser. He pointed out that the Reiser3 file system is deprecated according to its creator. I also found a blog entry quoting an email:

Ext3’s performance in some situations may not be on par with Reiser3, but it scales better and Andi mentioned the other day that there is quite a bit of research going into improving the locking and general performance of ext3 going on right now, and since reiser3 is stagnant, I
don’t doubt they’ll pass them soon. – from blog.linuxoss.com

In the comments section, I was able to read other points that my friend mentioned:

• other file systems consume more power than ext3
• stability is more important to the desktop user

I am still reading up on ext3 and other file systems. If you have been reading about them too, please feel free to share them here.