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Just use winget if you can a command line style install. It's strange (to not use a stronger word) to expect apt to work on Windows instead of the native alternative. It's like if someone complained explorer.exe does not work on a GNU/Linux distribution.

On Windows, if you want to use open-source command-line tools, it's best to use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which gives you a full Linux environment running in a VM that's tightly-coupled with the Windows OS (you can run windows .exe files from a linux terminal and they magically work).

However, the Windows Way is to typically avoid CLI tools and use a GUI program. For instance, you might use Handbrake instead of using ffmpeg directly.

These two rules solve the following problem:

> Holy moly. I can't imagine going through this "hunt it down, make sure it is from a trusted source, manually tie it into your system" for every little tool I want to quickly use

I don't know what perplexity is, but there are 2 easy solutions to what you want to do -

1. winget. Probably has ffmpeg, but I haven't checked. 2. You can just download it from their site. Google ffmpeg windows and first link gets me here: https://www.ffmpeg.org/download.html. You can install from source or you can just get exes.

Installing stuff is the easy part.

The benefit with windows is that for a vast majority of software, #2 is the process. And that’s it. It just works.

> I was wondering how all that works on Windows these days and typed "How do I apt install ffmpeg on Windows" i

Well, that's a pretty way to weird the question. If you searched on Google how to install ffmpeg on windows you'd just get the homepage which would link you to an executable installer.

Did you honestly never use Windows in your life?

  winget install ffmpeg