So let’s say I use proxychains with TOR (without any other proxies), but then configure the system to route all traffic through tor, will that break tor? Let’s say I use snowflake bridging in torrc file and configure per-say ubuntu to route all traffic through tor by default, then use proxychains for individual programs on ubuntu. will this break tor, reduce anonymity or cause any issues? will tor browser not work if I do this?
Also, let’s say I have a locally hosted proxy for a tool, with a localhost IP address. if I included that in proxychains, would that tool break tor if I tried to route everything through tor then connect to that tool? what if I want to use proxychains with tor but NOT route everything through TOR by default? does Snowflake usage matter in this case?
It will not inherently break, but it may break depending on how you route your traffic in your system. Note that even if you configure your system to route “all” traffic through tor, some software may ignore your settings and do not use tor. I think this is pretty common if you set system proxies, especially because not all software is proxy-aware.
Even if it didn’t break, it may slow your connection.
It wouldn’t break tor, but it wouldn’t work, because localhost is always, well, relative to the local host. Your connection would go through tor, and then try to go through the exit node again - which would not be configured to accept this connection and drop it. But this is not a problem, because:
you don’t need to anonymize your connection to a proxy you run on localhost: it’s literally on the same machine your tool runs on.
you could configure your proxy to accept external connections and connect to it with your public IP; but then using tor before it would be useless, because the next hop in your chain would see the IP of your localhost proxy - which is the same it would see if you didn’t use tor.
I hope this is clear enough, but if it isn’t let me know and I will try to explain better.