Snowflake acts as an entry point. A lot of official TOR entry nodes are blacklisted in some contries. Since Snowflake can run basically behind any IP anywhere where a browser is, it is hard to block them. In that way users in suppressed countries can still access the TOR network through Snowflake but the official entry nodes.

This is what I did on a Raspberry since snowflake can run as a normal service without a browser, too. The Raspberry then runs 24/7 and I don’t have to care if my browser is running.

But one has to be careful when using Invidious since the browser gets the video feed directly from Youtube/Google unless it is proxied or a VPN/Tor is used.

What is the dock on the left?

Interesting. On which distro? I don’t have this problem on Fedora. Here the update check is disabled by default.