GNOME 2 + Compiz equivalent?

Question

Running Fedora 14 and realize I need to either change distros or find an alternative to GNOME 3 in Fedora 17.

Based on what I have read to-date, XFCE and KDE are the go-to WMs if I want to avoid GNOME 3.

I tried KDE 4 and I wasn't impressed; I like the simplicity of GNOME 2 with Compiz and Emerald.

Can't stay on Fedora 14 forever, however, so...where to turn?

Basically looking for these features in my desktop environment:

1. GNOME Do or equivalent

2. Snap to grid/Window tiling
   A must-have, the ability to hot key focused window to a monitor grid region is a huge productivity win.

3. Zoom window to cursor
   In a multi-monitor setup sometimes it's nice to, say, GNOME Do > terminal in one monitor and then hot key the opened window to the other monitor just by zipping the mouse cursor anywhere on target monitor (followed by, of course, snap-to-grid hotkey, all without a single mouse click)

4. Polarization
   At night white background hurts the eyes, so I prefer to hot key polarize to black.

5. Multi-monitor support

I'm partial to Fedora given that I've worked with CentOS for years and have little experience with any other Linux distro; however, if the difference between Fedora and Arch, Mint, etc. is fairly subtle, I'll make the leap, just need a distro & desktop environment that allows me to be productive with keyboard hot keys and provides the above basic features.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Take a look at MATE, a fork of GNOME 2. I assume Compiz would work with it.

MATE is a fork of Gnome 2. It provides an intuitive and attractive desktop to Linux users using traditional metaphors.