Power management settings. How to enable the battery icon on the Linux Mint 13 MATE desktop. This is found under the Screensaver->Power management settings. I enabled the Compiz featureset by installing the compizconfig-settings-manager package and typing compiz –replace &exit in a terminal window to replace the existing window manager in MATE with the Compiz decorator. The setup in the Compiz config manager is depicted below. This is the configuration I am using to gain a basic workable configuration when using the Compiz decorator. Initially when the Compiz decorator is enabled, you will not be able to move windows or layer them, this will fix that promptly. Compiz on MATE is very fast, faster than the Cinnamon desktop that is for sure. I prefer to use a classic styled Gnome desktop over the new eye candy desktops.
Compiz has been around for a long time and is a good way to make your desktop smoother and faster. With the screen-shot option enabled in Compiz, you may hold the Windows key + mouse1 and drag to select an area of the screen and then release the keys to take a screen-shot of a certain area of the screen. That is very useful indeed when you are taking screen captures of parts of your screen for a blog post. The scale option for window switching is a nice way to switch between windows like in Unity. I had that same configuration when I was using Fedora Core 13 and the Gnome 2 desktop, it is nice to be able to use that again. I am not worried about workspace switching using Compiz, but the window switching is very useful when you need to select another window in a hurry.
Linux Mint is to be thanked for the excellent MATE desktop, finally we can use a desktop that is just like the old Gnome 2 desktop and works exactly the same. That is the draw of retro desktops, they prove to be better than the new ones. The Trinity project is a port of the KDE 3 source code to run on modern Linux distributions. This means that between MATE and the Trinity Desktop Environment, our beloved old desktops are coming back to the modern world. KDE 4.8.0 is a worthwhile desktop of course, but the KDE 3.4 release was extraordinary and was very fast and usable. A simple and easy to use desktop is what all Linux users want and the MATE desktop environment delivers that very well.