It's a bit of a statement for what you're trying to communicate with that lid - professional experience, political statements, personal "this is neat"...
And part of this is a for me the lid of the laptop is something that I'd need to be able to be comfortable with displaying in front of a CxO without worry about if they may be offended or not (though perl might be offensive to some).
So far no one has ever been offended by this though. HN is far more sensitive than the average CTO.
That can be a healthy attitude outside of work. People love personality.
But at work, that's not a healthy attitude. You're there to work together, not to be uncompromising in expressing yourself. Your stickers are probably fine, but I can also imagine plenty of musical artists that would certainly be offensive (and rightly so) to some people, whether for their lyrics or for their criminal behavior -- and then the attitude of "that's more your problem than mine" is not gonna fly.
Now I'm tempted to make a set of: Perl, COBOL, Java Beans, Java EE, ActiveX, Silverlight, VB.Net, ActiveDirectory, Kerberos, ...
In today's timeline, you'd need to be concerned about what some random TSA agent felt about your stickers and if that might get you pulled aside for additional screening.
For my personal shared culture, that is the sort of thing that can be exposed (or hidden) on a case by case basis. My choice of t-shirt where I can button up or down depending on the context says a lot more about me than the lid of my laptop. Granted, it' one message at a time - but there are things that I've had on t-shirts that I made sure to button up before going into the office and seeing the boss (old school, and I still have it - those were durable shirts - https://www.flickr.com/photos/strihs/8536766235/ ). On the other hand, I wouldn't put https://www.spreadshirt.com/shop/design/let+me+work+on+your+... on my laptop no matter how much I agree with it.
I would be amendable to putting a square of #22b7f2 on my laptop, and that opens up an entire discussion if recognized (I'm not quite ambitious or passionate enough to color the entire laptop that color).
In another comment I linked https://imgur.com/a/jWhyBmI as my laptop lid.
As someone based outside of the US, I rarely see people with stickers on their laptop. The very vast majority of cars also do not have bumper stickers here (and those that do might have one at most).
I see them at technical conferences in many different parts of the world, with people from many different parts of the world. It's not a US thing.
And many of the sticker pictures on this site appear to be from European countries, including at least Finland and Germany.
We do have a lot of stickers on cars too but it's more common to see them on windows of the car not the car body, and I think in general they're socially quite different to what you'd see in America. More like brand stickers and hobby stuff, or jokes, not so much politics or religion.
Now, my work laptop looks clearly distinct, not just from my own personal laptop, but also from all the identical laptops other people at work bring to meeting rooms.
The first soft-politico stickers I saw all over cons in the 90s/00s were their 'FUCK MICROSOFT' and 'FUCK GATES' stickers that exploded after the MS/Linux/SCO conflicts.
Before the MS debacles (was there a before?) it was mostly FREE KEVIN everywhere.
..which for reasons lead to 'this machine hacks oligarchies', and 'piss: it's whats for dinner' stickers shown in the link.
Speaking on that : Woodie Guthrie was better at marketing slogans than himself -- kind of interesting to consider how many more people are familiar with the 'This machine...' than his music.
When I was going to these things I tended to avoid 'extreme' ones -- I was often job hunting and didn't need to project an image that may hinder that effort.
Considering that background, expect them to look more like a random Berlin lightpost than a conversation piece.
