ext3 or xfs for desktop laptop

["David R. Litwin" <presently42@gmail.com>]

Hallo friendly list:

I've decided that windows has to go and a swap has to come. So, I'm a gonna clear the hard drive of my Toshiba satellite A70 laptop and give myself a new start on life. Now, I've been looking about some. It seems that ext3 or xfs are the best filesystems, with /boot being on a seperate ext2 partition using xfs (do I need to do this?). Is this true? Is it true of a laptop which I use for every day desktop purposes? I hear also that xfs is a pain to deal with if the system crashes. Is this true? How so? Finally, I've heard of zfs. Is this worth looking in to more?

I know that this is A: been done to death and D: really... shall we say, open ended.... But, I should dearly like to have the lists opinions on this.

Thanks much.

-- 
—A watched bread-crumb never boils.
—My hover-craft is full of eels.
—[...]and that's the he and the she of it.