Regarding seeing battery levels from the GUI, I currently use fdpowermon.
It polls the battery info from sysfs every few seconds via acpi.

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 7:34 PM, Adam Borowski <kilobyte@???> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 04, 2015 at 01:19:26AM +0100, Svante Signell wrote:
> > Last time I installed MATE in Debian it was not dependent on *systemd*.
> > Maybe it is now, I haven't upgraded for some time.
>
> In jessie, you need systemd (but not systemd-sysv) for things like
> shutdown,
> reboot, suspend or hibernate from the GUI, seeing battery levels, being
> able
> to mount USB/etc drives, and probably more.
>
> > However, maybe they can be persuaded to remove that dependency if it is
> > there.
>
> The dependency goes through the Utopia stack, maintained by some of most
> zealous systemd proponents, so that would require quite some work on the
> MATE side to fix this regression.
>
> Users and Devuan can simply rebuild stuff against ConsoleKit. For now.
>
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