When starting to use PulseAudio on a KDE system, the following steps should be enough: - set USE="pulseaudio" - rebuild affected package with --newuse - restart KDE This doesn't work (busy sound device), as knotify4 still doesn't make use of PulseAudio and needs to be rebuilt manually to work. After rebuilding kde-base/knotify manually and restarting KDE, everything works as expected. It turns out, kde-base/knotify (no 'pulseaudio' USE flag) has automagic dependencies on media-sound/pulseaudio. elias@moria ~ % ldd /usr/bin/knotify4|ack -i pulse libpulse.so.0 => /usr/lib64/libpulse.so.0 (0x00007f19f64fd000) libpulse-mainloop-glib.so.0 => /usr/lib64/libpulse-mainloop-glib.so.0 (0x00007f19f62f8000) libpulsecommon-1.1.so => /usr/lib64/libpulsecommon-1.1.so (0x00007f19f3787000) Thanks to 'soa2ii' for investigating and reporting this issue.
Knotify doesn't depend on pulseaudio. Remember that ldd lists dependencies of dependencies - what are you seeing in your ldd output is inherited from libphonon.
