I've used MariaDB for a long time and it is really great for a lot of use cases. But when a user forgets the password, it really gets annoying quickly.
There are tons of different tutorials on how to reset it, but none work.

I've tried several versions of these scripts:

#!/bin/bash

set -x

sudo killall -9 mysqld_safe mysqld mariadb mariadbd

sudo service mysqld stop

sudo mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables &

sleep 5

echo 'FLUSH PRIVILEGES; ALTER USER "root"@"localhost" IDENTIFIED BY "mynewpassword"; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;' | mysql -uroot

sleep 5

sudo killall -9 mysqld_safe mysqld mariadb mariadbd

if [[ -e /var/lib/mysql/aria_log_control_OLD ]]; then

    sudo rm /var/lib/mysql/aria_log_control_OLD

fi

sudo mv /var/lib/mysql/aria_log_control /var/lib/mysql/aria_log_control_OLD

sudo service mysqld start

set -x

sudo service mysqld stop

sudo apt-get -y purge mariadb-server

sudo rm -rf /var/lib/mysql

sudo apt-get -y install --reinstall mariadb-server

sudo mkdir /var/lib/mysql/

sudo killall -9 mysqld mariadbd mysqld mysql mysqld_safe

sudo service mariadb start

sudo mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables &                  

sudo mysql_install_db --user=mysql

sudo mysql_secure_installation

and a lot of more stuff.

But nothing works anymore. I cannot even re-initialize the /var/lib/mysql directory. This NEEDS to be a simple call. mariadb_reinit_mysql_data_dir and done. Empty installation, just like after a fresh format of the system. No more questions asked.

There has to be an official documentation that just works. Maybe even a mariadb_forgot_password program that does all of the heavy lifting.

I have several computers which I had to re-install the whole OS or abandon development on because I could not figure out how to properly reset the password. There isn't even a way of re-initializing the /var/lib/mysql directory that just works. All of them plainly suck.

This may very well be my own fault, of course, but the lack of official documentation (or at least the impossibility of finding it) on this problem makes it REALLY annoying. Every page that comes up at google does these things differently, but none work, and after trying each of them the problem progressively gets worse all the time.