Phonon: Can We Live Without It?
 

Is it possible to delete (removepkg) Phonon and use the ALSA system instead or is Phonon hardwired into KDE 4.xx?
I've been reading the message base on the KDE forum and it would seem both Phonon and Pulseaudio are more trouble than they are worth.

To Answer My Own Question...
 

To answer my own question, no. You have to have Phonon installed or KDE will not run.

However, since it has nothing to do with KDE, Xfce ran perfectly fine without Phonon.