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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 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.