well... whether debian is the best distro or not is up for debate, but it is one of the cleanest distros. it's also one of the hardest to setup, especially if you don't know quite what you're doing.
reiserfs support should be included in the newest kernel, which is, at the time of this posting, 2.4.9. all you need to do is download the kernel sources from
www.kernel.org, and configure and compile the kernel.