In what way is WireGuard easier to block than SOCKS?

that's "shadowsocks"

wireguard is fingerprintable. it's trivial to look at packets and see "this is wireguard". and block the packets

Outline traffic looks much more like noise (pre-shared keys, lack of handshake, …)

Shadowsocks is defunct now. Has been for a while; a connected server's IP can be detected and blocked within hours. That means Outline's defunct in a lot of places too. What's currently 'hot', in large part, is v2ray [1], be that vless, vmess, trojan, etc.

[1] https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2Ray

> that's "shadowsocks"

I'm not familiar with the software, but according to Wikipedia it's a client to connect to a SOCKS5 proxy:

> Shadowsocks is not a proxy on its own, but (typically) is the client software to help connect to a third-party SOCKS5 proxy, which is similar to a Secure Shell (SSH) tunnel.

Are you saying that's incorrect?

that's oversimplification. raw socks5 is a low-level thing without encryption.

shadowsocks puts a solid cryptolayer on top of it, designed specifically to be hard to detect. its Chinese origin gives a hint here: it is created to circumvent detection by "great firewall"

outline builds a user-friendly toolset on top of it