The primary thing you need to know are THE DONGLES TO AVOID.
- Lightblue chinese dongle: stuck with only Hekate 3.2 payload. WORST dongle
- RCMLoader/XKit/AceNS: CANNOT HOLD A CHARGE. Even after charging to "full", it will lose its charge in less than an hour, and be completely dead. Trash capacitors. An AutoRCM Switch that has crashed CANNOT recharge it.
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Anyway, other than those dongles, everything else is usable as is and works fine.
- SX Gear/Pro - uses capacitors, charges in 5-10 seconds, good for a few injects. Retains the charge for a week or two. Stuck with only the SX payload (but the SX bootmenu can chainload any other payload)
SX Pro has one SX OS license built in, SX Gear has none.
- NS Atmosphere and R4S both have batteries, so won't suddenly die on you.
NS Atmosphere uses its own flashing software to change payloads (but its a bit buggy supposedly)
R4S uses uf2 files.