But is the correct answer to not use mariadb? It seems the issue was never resolved (well the issue of actually using mariadb). I’m having the same problem, when I run systemctl start mariadb it hangs and does not work.
Turns out the VM I was using had a full hard drive!
Unfortunately nothing in journalctl or mariadb initialization complained about that. Though rare, seems that would be a pretty good log item for them to add