I'm not clear on why root/superuser would NOT be functional here; that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I need to read up further about that. And I note the proposed 'skip' workaround ... but isn't it just that -- a workaround, around an existing 'problem'? Do note from my OP, the existing/installed charset/collation for the 4 initialized DBs | information_schema | CREATE DATABASE `information_schema` /*!40100 DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 */ | | mysql | CREATE DATABASE `mysql` /*!40100 DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci */ | | performance_schema | CREATE DATABASE `performance_schema` /*!40100 DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 */ | | test | CREATE DATABASE `test` /*!40100 DEFAULT CHARACTER SET latin1 */ | Given the config in my.cnf already defined at time of 1st data initialization, it seems that that's an initial problem, no? Shouldn't the initialization result be all charset/collation 'correctly' set, as specified? Also, noting in the errant script mariadb_10_4/build/scripts/mysql_fix_privilege_tables.sql posted fyi here, https://paste.fedoraproject.org/paste/DQXBxBbyBMQS7eCZRgEwbA you can see the numerous ... COLLATE utf8_general_ci ... (as well as a couple of ... COLLATE utf8_bin ...) which I'd guess are causing those ERRORs I see.