On Tue, 2017-09-26 at 03:42 -0400, Taiidan@??? wrote:
> Why not use the gnome 2 fork MATE?

Why not? It mostly works out of the box, I'm using it now. If you
install it onto a laptop you won't have working power management because
of dependencies on systemd. Google can give you the details but you
need to locally rebuild mate-applets, mate-power-manager and
mate-session-manager, some with no changes some with one liners. Slept
since I did it and can't remember details at the moment. :) Once you
fix those three pakages, no problems.