I am having an issue with playing Wii games on my Dolphin build (dolphin-emu version 5.0+dfsg-1 package). GameCube games launch and load normally, but Wii games, no matter the file type (I have tried gcz, gcm, and iso), generate a blank window and freeze the application. Although I have seen in some threads that installing a future developer build solves the problem, I cannot install developer builds on Debian, nor can I revert to an earlier version. I am not an experienced Linux user, and one of the solutions I had was to try to manually compile a previous version from the GitHub repository, but due to my inexperience that blew up in my face. I took a long time transferring the game files to my machine, and I would hate for that time to be wasted.
I'm not too well versed on the Dolphin packages hosted in the Debian repositories, but 5.0+dfsg-1 (oldstable) was updated back in 2016? That's quite the old package....
As for compiling on Debian, it "should" be fairly straight-forward. Here's what I did to find out what you needed to do to fix your problem:
I spun up a VM of Debian 9 and tried to follow the
Building Dolphin on Linux guide. Cmake complained about library versions, so I had to compile cmake 3.17 and gcc 8.2 from source. In the time it took to compile gcc 8.2, I spun up another VM, installed Debian 10 from scratch, compiled Dolphin from git, was able to boot into NSMB Wii, and made dinner. I gave up on Debian 9 when cmake said I didn't have a high enough version of Qt5, and I didn't want to suffer through that again like I did on Ubuntu 16.04.
TL;DR: Moral of my suffering: update to Debian 10 and it'll let you build Dolphin yourself so you can get the latest updates.