Multiple X servers and Firefox problems

As I've said before, running StumpWM on Ubuntu using a new .desktop file in /usr/share/xsessions/ did not turn out a very pleasant experience. This article however gave me another idea. How about running a separate X server? I decided to give it a shot.

I simply created a .xinitrc file in my home directory and in it I put this: exec stumpwm. After that, I switched to a tty by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1 and ran startx -- :1. Then I pressed Ctrl-Alt-F8 to switch to the new X screen. It actually worked! I quickly copied my configuration from my laptop and restarted StumpWM. Everything seemed to be working, until I tried to start Firefox.

Firefox simply gave me an error message saying that another instance of Firfox was already running. I searched about this on the Internet and learned that I can run Firefox in a new profile and with the -no-remote option to stop it from connecting to the already running instance. In order to create a new profile, you can run firefox --ProfileManager. Then to start Firefox with the new profile and as a new instance you can run firefox -no-remote -P profilename.

Long story short, it didn't work as I thought it should. The first time I ran it, Firefox started correctly. But whenever I ran one of the other commands to open a new tab or anything, it just gave me an error saying another instance is running but is not responding. I finally found out that if I drop the -no-remote option (while retaining -P) it will work as expected.

The question for me now is, should I stick with my plan of building on Debian, or should I stick with Ubuntu? I still get doses of unstability on Ubuntu while Debian remains rock solid. Also, keeping Ubuntu around might tempt me to go to Unity whenever I ran into difficulties instead of trying to find a workaround and learn something in the process. I'm gonna need to think about this.