Good news. Looking forward to seeing what you end up with, if you stick with MATE + I3.
One question, you have 3 bars in your screenshots. Two at the bottom and one at the top. Is that the end result you are looking for?
Any more than one bar is my pet peeve for me… which I part of why I never tried MATE. A lot of the screenshots show 2 bars.
Wasn’t trying for the 3rd bar, it came with i3. Mate has a top and bottom bar, I actually like the two bars. I’m stuck with 3 until I can figure out how to lose one of them on the bottom, the i3 bar is kinda small and hard for me to see.
hi guys. So this is my MATE+i3 on Arch so far …
MATE allows you to delete the panels, so I deleted the Panel at the bottom as my preference is the I3 panel. Eventually I am going to get rid of the top panel after I get a menu going.
Welcome to the forums! 
Thanks for sharing.
I like this. I would like to see i3 gaps between windows. But beyond that it’s very unique setup you guys are attempting!
Depends on what you want to have. I use Mate because it’s a continuation of GNOME 2 (how GNOME used to look) and it acts the same too, which is what I like. In my opinion, it’s either Mate or XFCE .the rest are too much like Windows in looks for my taste.
My tweaking comes slow. The joys of having toddler. But here are the gaps.
As I do more tweaking to get it exactly where I want I will let you guys know.
The fortunate thing with i3 implementation in Arch, is that gaps come built in. I just had to place the commands in the config file.
Nice! For me, I like GNOME as I feel much at home as a MacOS user. I keep it pretty default I just add dash-to-dock: A dock for the Gnome Shell. and gnome-shell-extension-tiling-assistant. …like MacOS, I don’t need the fast workspace switching, but I DO like tiling windows. 
Okay fixed the 3 bars issue:
Its pretty cool that both you and @shybry747 are using MATE + i3 but slightly different end result. The beauty and flexibility of FOSS. 
It looks really nice to use. Tho it’s too dated for my tastes.
Well I added i3 to my actual desktop
Good Day Gentlemen. As promised, I was able to do another tweak. I have now moved away from Mate Panels completely, and I am using Rofi for the menu. I just have a few more bugs to work out but this is settling more and more to what I like.
Big improvement. The icons sizing etc., are a massive improvement. Without all the candy bars top and bottom it looks like a workspace. I would use this for sure, barring the fact that Gnome 2 is soo legacy. 
jk
Now it’s time to switch to vi or even vim. 
speaking of legacy, where do you change the screen lock at ?
Nano is more better 
Speaking of Legacy Hayden, how do you change the lock screen timeouts:)
PS nano is better 
Lol. I am a nano fan too. Vim and vi … Whew … Nano all the way. That’s always on the list of first programs to install.
I haven’t played around with the lock timeouts as yet. Right now Mate is still controlling my lock, so I would have to look for it under the Mate settings.
