I've decided to stop using KDE after yrs of use... given that gentoo compiles everything from scratch, its just getting to much time lost jacking around with kde during upgrades.
But also I'd forgotten what the oldtime linux desktops were like. fvwm was the main one in use when I started circa 1997. I see blackbox is even a bit more stark... but since I am mainly command line oriented it doesn't present a problem. But cutting to the chase here, I'm getting rid of KDE but I see kde-base/arts shows lots of dependencies. Even now that I've changed my USE flag `kde' to `-kde' qdepends -C kde-base/arts|awk '{gsub(/ /,"\n");print}' kde-base/arts-3.5.10: x11-libs/qt:3 >=dev-libs/glib-2 media-libs/alsa-lib media-libs/libogg media-libs/libvorbis media-sound/esound media-libs/libmad media-libs/audiofile dev-util/pkgconfig =sys-devel/automake-1.9* >=sys-devel/autoconf-2.61 sys-devel/libtool sys-devel/make dev-util/pkgconfig dev-lang/perl I'm pretty sure at least some of this doesn't actually depend on kde-base/arts but not quite sure what to make of the output.