My qtile config
qtile docs can be found here
Info on running qtile as the wm for Gnome can be found here. It should be possible to do something similar with mate...
$ sudo apt-get install libpangocairo-1.0-0 libxcb-render0-dev libffi-dev
$ sudo python3 -m pip install xcffib cairocfii qtile
$ cp misc/qtile.desktop /usr/share/xsessions/