So, I had costume firmware in the past on my switch, My daughter "accidentally" updated and since wanted to play Smash online I decided to not hack it again, Today I bought another Switch and it happens to be an unpatched one on 4.1.0. my doubt now is Is it important to "keep" the 4.1.0 firmware like it was adviced in the past? any advantage to keeping it? the other one is, Say I hack the new one (4.1.0 firmware) instead of the old one (8.0.1) Am I still risking myself to getting banned since I already hacked and played online on? I have been playing online on this one since November every day. is 8.0.1 hackable?
Here's my question: what do you plan on using the hacked Switch for? I'm in a similar boat, except I haven't played online at all (yet, and I might never), and I never, EVER hacked my main Switch. Yes, I got a used Switch tablet, some more Joy-Cons and controllers for Smash because holidays were coming up (and honestly, because I like having multiple options for the color schemes), and got a second Switch because there was no emuNAND at the time, and it sounded like Nintendo was a LOT more banhammer happy than every one of their previous systems, be they consoles or handhelds. You got yourself in a good position, and unless if the Switch your daughter accidentally updated is mainly used by her, you could have a clean Switch and a dirty Switch, the latter taking the ban while the former can be used for online gameplay, easy updating, and native Switch game compatibility as opposed to the many, MANY ways the Switch can be hacked, CFW packages, OSes that can be run (Lakka now has sound, Ubuntu is now a thing, I'd recommend looking up the L4T Noob thread if you're a noob to Linux or if, like yours truly, you've dabbled with Linux, but never really made it your main OS and don't have time to necessarily learn all the nitty gritty atm, if ever), and homebrew that can be played.
If you're anything like I and want the MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE AND POWAH THAT NINTENDO FORBIDS YOU FROM USING WITH THEIR NATIVE OS, then I'd use L4T right now, though a certain Reddit post that I saw on r/SwitchHaxing did mention something about Android with GPU drivers coming soon, so that may be more your thing. I'd have a M/KB for the initial setup of Ubuntu via L4T to be able to set everything up right now. After confirming everything as working, you should be able to fix some of the weirdness with the default button maps for things to run smoothly without sudden hiccups and WTF moments that come from the weird obtuseness of the default controls that come with the noob build of L4T utilizing the Ubuntu distro of Linux. It personally is the best solution out there right now IMO, but as all things Switch homebrew are (especially given how young the Switch is), everything is a WIP, and we may get a better functioning version of Reicast for Horizon (the Switch OS name as dubbed by the community here and on r/SwitchHaxing). Yes, GC via Dolphin can be run on the emulator to an
impressive extent to where I actually could play through Soul Calibur 2's Arcade Mode just fine and Melee at a very smooth,
almost full speed as long as it was 1-on-1 on Hyrule Temple, but as Modern Vintage Gamer (a Youtuber who's made a lot of homebrew for the OG Xbox and some for the Switch), pointed out in his Nvidia Shield TV review (the hardware uses very similar hardware to the Switch, except the Switch has an additional GB of RAM), the Switch being designed to accomodate portability needs and account for a battery means that some things that'd run just fine on a Shield TV may not run on a Switch, and that he doubts the viability of GC emulation on the device, let alone Wii for what it's worth. (I wish there were more Wii ports that took advantage of the better tracking of the Switch Joy-Cons, but I'm not a developer or publisher, so what do I know) It doesn't accept Joy-Cons in the rails right now though.
Otherwise, there's Lakka (or Lakka-Switch as natinusala, the homebrew solution's author, calls it out of respect for the original OS' dev team. I can distinguish the difference, but whatever) if you mainly use your Switch portably, because it doesn't do anything involving the USB-C port (that includes docking and support for wireless controllers) outside of charging, and in my experience, I don't think charging via this method even works very well. It's got similar compatibility to L4T Ubuntu, but no Dolphin, and everything revolves around RA.
Last, but most certainly not least, there's all of the homebrew made for Horizon, but there's a whole laundry list of reading that you're gonna want to do if you want to do everything from playing N64 via RA(with LOTS of stuttering in my experience, I might add, though it wouldn't surprise me if I'm doing something wrong), openBOR, ports of GZDoom, Half-Life 1, OpenLara, Reicast (which runs OK, but has a lot of graphical glitches) and other homebrew.
All of this isn't to discourage you by any means, but if you're not actively following this community and/or r/SwitchHaxing (avoid r/SwitchHacks, it isn't updated nearly as much as the former most of the time), there could be things that happen that could leave you far enough behind that you'll have to be reading about as much as this paragraph, if not more, in terms of information in configuring this or that, solving this problem that comes up, how to do this, etc..