Dear Alyssa, many thanks for your bug report! But I cannot reproduce it. I did remove python3-setuptools on my system and can still start Gajim. Could you please send the complete Python stack trace to this bug report? That way we can hopefully find out why we got different results.
Thanks! PS: About other issues you face with Gajim: - just ask in the XMPP MUC ga...@conference.gajim.org; most of the time, one gets helpful and friendly answers - report bugs here: https://dev.gajim.org/gajim/gajim/issues - feel free to report bugs at Debian, even if they seem to be upstream bugs, no problem