Good evening,

2016-01-16 20:53 GMT+01:00, Steve Litt <slitt@???>:
> Probably not. My fight is with systemd, not dbus or PulseAudio.
> However, the whole systemd episode has made me untrusting of anything
> promoted by Freedesktop.Org, so in an ideal world I'd have no dbus.

A friend of mine uses don't-know-which distro without dbus.
Everything is easy when you're a lisp-nut and you do the majority of
your computing from inside Emacs.

> It might be possible that this dependency is a per-distro thing. The
> reason I say that both these commands output nothing on a Void Linux
> machine:
[snip]

Libnotify depends on GLib, which under its GIO sub-module has functions
and data objects for telling things to a DBus... bus.
Yeah, GLib reimplements what it should do under libdbus. And C99.
Yeah, something may complain whenever you try to run dunst and
notify-send and dbus isn't up, but the dependency graph of libnotify
not depending on dbus or libdbus is technically correct.