I think I’d rather everyone was using mariadb, too. It’d simplify things for us, but I don’t think we’ll ever get away from folks installing the upstream MySQL packages from Oracle.
So, i think for Virtualmin 7, coming by the end of the year (hopefully just a few weeks away, but I’m always swamped…just absolutely overwhelmed at all times, we just don’t have enough developers to manage a project of this size and scope and a userbase this large), we’ll switch the default database in Virtualmin installations to mariadb for all distros.
Maybe I should be looking for people who object to that change rather than people who support it. The general community feeling across all distros does now seem to favor mariadb. We just haven’t done a new major version in a couple of years, so our installer isn’t reflecting that yet (we don’t change package selection between minor versions, as it’d be way too disruptive and confusing).