Laptops with Stickers

My laptop hasn't had stickers since a CTO asked why mine didn't have any stickers like the ones on the laptops of his cool cloud team. Personally I've found laptop stickers bad taste since then.

It has become less fun since it has become common. My most recent laptop doesn't have stickers but I might apply some from my sizable collection before it becomes secondary laptop in 1-2 years.

You can still "hipster it" and only use actually cool stickers. Community open source projects, hackerspaces, good conferences, EFF and similar organizations, weird funny stuff.

Good:

https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/1762135251053-...

https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/IMG_9222-1.jpe...

"Employee of the month":

https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/IMG_20200717_2...

The problem is that a lot of that has been ruined by corporate cringe and "weird funny stuff" is no longer weird and funny, especially when you have a bunch of influencers trying to either monetise it, sanitise it and/or attach their personal brand to it.

e.g. One of the biggest people that does Debian content, does a bunch of absolute cringe behaviour associated with them where I almost want to die of second hand embarrassment.

From my POV (old?, never on social mass media), you live in a strange world if some influencer has any... influence on your opinion of Debian. I see little to no monetization of "the good stuff".

They don't have any influence about what I think of Debian. What happens though is people outside will associate their (unbearably cringe in this case) behaviour with you, whether you like it or not.

I'm a long-time Debian user and I have no idea who you're talking about. How much weight do they actually carry? Who is this influencer you're talking about?

Go on YouTube, Mastodon or any sort of social media that is bit techy orientated and you will find it easily.

What? I’ve been active frequently on Mastodon since 2018 and I have no idea who or what you’re talking about. A link would be helpful rather than playing the “oh you know who…” game.

There are loads of tech influencers in the Linux space on Youtube and loads of techie platforms. There is various levels of cringe in the Linux space, some of it is honestly embarrassing. If you don't see it already, you are going to tell me it isn't a problem. There isn't one person doing this. There are plenty.

If you won't say who is the person you're talking about, can you at least tell an example of that cringe behavior?

It isn't I won't say. It is I can't remember because I pretty much insta-block it when I see it.

Some notable examples of stuff I've seen in Linux / Tech land the last few months:

- One person was dressed in a furry lizard suit, while compiling gentoo.

- Another person made a song about Debian packages. I thought it was a gag at first.

- Another woman was dressed in a school girl outfit, cat ears and a push up bra (not sure she was Linux stuff, but it was tech).

I am not expecting everyone to be some greybeard in his office but some of it is a bit much and sometimes they have really good info in the video, but the initial impression is so jarring that it will put people off (I had people tell me this).

I actually made my own YouTube channel because I was trying to find decent information to send to someone who was a new Linux user without this BS. I ended up making videos myself detailing how to setup a bunch of stuff up.