MATE with Awesome doesn't prioritize mate-panel on top

[LIsLinuxIsSogood]

My new Window Manager of choice is Awesome WM, which I'm using inside of the Desktop Session for MATE, by having applied the dconf to set window manager to awesome-gnome in gsettings.

This is great for all practical purposes, except the windows in Awesome are covering the MATE panel, which i have to change virtual desktops to an empty one in order to view the contents of the panel even when the focus is on it (not raising on top of Awesome's "managed windows")

Are there some obvious places in X, MATE session, or Awesome where I could seek to change that...I have so far not read the entire documentation of Awesome so that is also a place I will go to in order to see if there is a way to prioritize the panel to be on top.

Any help is appreciated!

[bunder]

mate's panel seems to be always on top, and I don't see a toggle anywhere to enable to make sure it stays that way. I'm guessing this is some sort of layering issue since you're replacing marco with awesome. Although I'm not entirely sure whether this is a mate problem or an awesome one.
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[LIsLinuxIsSogood]

Thanks bunder for the feedback...maybe if there is time I will try a few other wm's and see if the problem exists in other cases or just with awesome. Thanks for your quick reply. Note that I am switching over to Awesome, since I am wanting to experiment with the basic look and feel of gnome2 or mate desktop but with a more proven window manager, and awesome has tons of cool features with it including a lua scriptable set of components that marco doesn't attempt to use. It is really nothing against Marco, although we'll see if I notice any less of a tendency for the wm component to crash mid session, which Marco did from time to time, maybe just because of the high-amount of tinkering with it I did.

But as for Mate on the Gentoo box, another thing I was wondering about that is related to the panel but not so much to the situation I already explained, but still seems worth mentioning that on another box of mine (with Ubuntu installed) I the mate-panel can be 'undocked' and float somehwere out over the middle of the screen (not the edges). But on my Gentoo box I can't seem to find a way to do it. Would be interested to know if that is something I might not be set up for and how come.