debian

Debian 9 has MariaDB locked down to 10.1, plus security patches from 10.2 and later. But anything looking still thinks it's 10.1, which for things like NextCloud is a pain. They haven't quite made it outright rejecting such an old DB, but there are quite a lot of warnings about it.

Thankfully, there are repos available for pretty much every distribution to be able to install even up to the latest stable branch directly from the MariaDB Foundation.

Make sure you Add signing key to apt without mass deps.

First up, you can modify the initrd environment to give yourself more programs if needed. Don't forget the shared libraries a program might need to run!

Boot the system and catch the Grub menu. If you can't catch it (because someone possibly set the wait to zero), hold down the left shift button during boot.

Press "e" to edit the kernel command line and add "break=" onto it, where is one of following: