I’m a casual gitlab user for my private projects. Since I don’t use gitlab everyday I keep forgetting what the icons on the left mean. To make sure I’m understood correctly I attach part of the view of the dashboard of a project - what I mean is the icons on the left black strip under the gitlab logo.
I would much prefer to have a text description instead of icons so that I don’t have to click 3 different things before I come to what I want.
What size is your window? When window size is small, the sidebar collapses as you have just seen. When it’s larger you have control of whether it is collapsed or not with the arrow button on the bottom of the sidebar.
I work with a maximized firefox window with 1280x1024 rsolution, but I always have my monitor vertically (i.e. its longer edge is vertical). To force gitlab to show text next to icons I need to zoom out to 80%, which isn’t great but, if there’s no better solution, will do.