is this possible for android 9? (Pie) I'd assume not. sorry, not used to samsung phones yet and this is all wonky to me
Everything detailed in this guide is still perfectly do-able on pie. If you are trying to do the "carrier switching" part, you will need the combination firmware to match your bootloader. For U7 or S7 bootloaders, you can use the combo from here
https://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-note-8/development/root-t4060707. This will not work if you are running the newest V8 bootloader that was just updates like a week ago, and you cannot downgrade bootloaders. EDIT: Make sure that you use the latest N950W firmware to get the Canadian Home_CSC file, don't use the one from the guide since it's for much older firmware.
You should note that part of the guide isn't really necessary as long as you have a sim card for whatever carrier you want to switch to. If you want the carrier agnostic firmware, install the N950U1 FW via odin and don't worry about sim cards. If you want carrier firmware, install the N950U FW. The carrier name on the firmware doesn't actually matter, as long as it's N950U it will convert itself to whatever sim card is in the phone after installation (or whatever the last sim card was if the slot is empty upon installing). USERDATA files also don't matter, it just contains pre-compiled dalvik-cache files to make the first boot faster. If you wipe data in recovery after flashing firmware with a USERDATA file, it deletes it's contents anyway.
If you are looking for a source to download the latest firmware, use SamFirm. Just google search "samfirm xda" and you should be able to find it. The application itself is deprecated but it works fine, and will download much faster than any of those sketchy firmware sites.
