Add ability to transfer on setup

[upintheairsheep]

Vanilla OS, and by extension all Linux distributions I know of do not provide a method to automatically transfer data from a foreign operating system or a foreign backup.

Vanilla OS should be welcoming to users that do not know much about technology, which Linux mostly achieved already. However, a transfer screen needs to be implemented, asking the user if they would like to transfer first, then telling them which platform they would like to move from, and give a setup process per-platform. The program and GUI to transfer user data to vOS could be another project separate from this due to it's complexity and large amount of pull requests. The user could choose to transfer from an existing partition or drive that contains the Linux, Windows, macOS, or ChromeOS Flex installation, or in the future, choose to transfer from a remote computer via WiFi, Thunderbolt/USB-C, and other protocols in the future. The software should guide a user whenever necessary, and when transferring, show what data is being transferred at the moment, with a progress bar with the full transfer, and a view to show more verbose transfer status showing every single file being transferred. Note that support for importing content from Android and iPadOS should also be considered due to using tablets as PCs becoming more of a practice.

Similar initiatives include a project for from Windows https://github.com/Whop42/LinuxConvert but only supports a few programs to transfer from for Windows. It could be based on the code, and the intended target is Elementary OS. The LEAPP series, which comprises of iLEAPP (iOS), ALEAPP (Android), WLEAPP (Windows), cLEAPP (ChromeOS), and linLEAPP (Linux), among others that are unrelated are FOSS tools that transform data files on a system into HTML reports for investigative purposes. Plug-ins for a similar tool called Autopsy also can process certain data from Windows and macOS, and can be used as reference for creating a transfer tool.

Closed Source Examples:
Google’s Data Transfer tool on the play store, which is closed source as well as Smart Switch on Samsung which is also closed source are examples of this on mobile devices.

macOS comes built in with a data migration tool to transfer from a remote Windows PC or another Mac, Time Machine backup, or partition.

[coffandro]

I personally agree we need something like this in the Linux space, if someone like yourself would create a robust CLI tool to do so I personally assume most projects would be more than willing to adopt it quickly.