This is not an easy question about satchels. They require size for some fun stuff in game, i.e. player can stay on top of satchel, satchel can stay in air, etc... Yes I think these aren't widely used in tournament games, but for fun I have a lot of time passed with this, it was interesting.
Solution I came to after all is: fix a bug that satchels stay on map if player is killed or disconnected, i.e. remove them on these events.
And second change is to not stuck if you respawn in satchel(s). This can be achieved by removing satchels from physents on player move, if play is stuck in them.
moved to HL section
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife/issues/787
Nothing extracted yet.
This is not a Linux issue, but if you are working with the game now it's one that might be worth looking into, as it plagues the gameplay often.
The Satchel charges dropped on the maps can block doors (eg. on Crossfire the blast door breaks when it tries to close on a planted c4, and after that you can start the alarm more often than it's regular cooldown should allow - see this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlUpm-wL2Z0) and elevators (on a ton of maps) from working properly. A simple solution would be to make those models not take up 3D space after being placed.
Also there are many balance tweaks that could be done in the multiplayer maps just by changing a couple of item spawns, if you'd like to work on that we could compile a list to make them a lot more enjoyable. The game still has a fairly active multiplayer community and a few changes would be welcome.