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Error message mentioning utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci when restoring on MariaDB

MariaDB is a database server which is mostly compatible with MySQL, but not fully. There are some features missing, including Unicode 9.0 support (the utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci collation) that MySQL had since version 8. If you take a backup of a site on MySQL 8 and restore it to MariaDB you will get an error if any of the tables or their columns was using the utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci collation.

If you run into this problem, after extracting the backup archive with Kickstart and BEFORE clicking on the Run the Installer button edit the file installation/framework/database/restore/mysqli.php and change the line

static $MySQL8 = null; 

to

static $MySQL8 = false; 

This triggers the code which has existed since July 2020 to convert the MySQL 8-only utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci collation to utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci, therefore solving the problem you had durign restoration.