Add a transfer screen

[upintheairsheep]

Problem

Elementary 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.

Proposal

Elementary 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 eOS 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, Bluetooth, USB, Thunderbolt/USB-C, FireWire or Ethernet (but first just make it WiFi/Ethernet and P2P cable transferred). 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.

Prior Art (Optional)

A project for Windows, which most users will be moving from, is already here https://github.com/Whop42/LinuxConvert but only supports a few artifacts/software 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.

Google’s Data Transfer tool on the play store, which is closed source as well as Smart Switch on Samsung which is 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.