Surge 1.9 is a major feature expansion over January's Surge 1.8 release, including 4 new oscillator types, 15 new effects, a large number of microtuning enhancements (including support for ODDSound MTS-ESP), substantial new content including a set of patches tailor-made for the new oscillators by Jacky Ligon, and much more.
This is a huge release. They have added Mutable Instruments' Clouds and Plaits to the effects and VCO sections which is amazing...plucked strings into shimmer reverb? Yes please!
Just wish it would get updated in kxstudio, I'm still stuck with 1.7. I know you can easily download the new version but I have projects which seem to break (or at least I get warned that it might) if I change from the kxstudio to the official one.
I have been updating and the problem for me has been the kxstudio version is numbered "5:1.7.1" which is higher than 1.9.0, despite being the older version. So, when I update, I need to type afterwards
Surge isn't doing an LV2 version at the moment, which might have something to do with why that repo isn't putting the new version and might have something to do with the warnings about projects breaking.
You can install the .deb that's on the main Surge page.
If .deb files don't work for your distro, you can still install from it without much trouble. It's just a couple pre-made binaries and some preset files. I did this in Manjaro, since I didn't realize it would be in the repo so soon (I could've waited a few more days, as it turned out).
-Open the .deb with an archive manager.
-Extract the data.tar.xz archive from it.
-Extract what's inside that, recreating the folder structure as is (most extractors do this by default).
-Place the folders/files in the locations that are indicated in the file structure of the folder you extracted.
Presets go here:
usr/share/surge
Plugins go here:
usr/lib/vst3
If Surge won't open in your DAW (as long as that directory is in your plugin directory list), it's missing a dependency (for me it was some cursor library). You can go to the directory with the Surge.so file and in Terminal type "ldd Surge.so". If anything is missing, it'll give you an indication. From there you can figure out which package was missing and add it the way you'd normally add packages in your distro. If you're concerned about dependency conflicts with your distro's version, what I do is to add the version of that dependency which is listed in the distro's repo as being current. That way if anything "breaks", it's the plugin that won't work, and not anything else installed in my distro. But since I use a distro that's very up-to-date, I don't really have an issue with the distro requiring old dependencies that are incompatible with new software.