Before I go any further, I will say that I have read many other posts and tried to fix this issue, but I just end up not being able to go anywhere because of more errors when trying to execute the commands.
I have no idea how the issue occurred, but when I try to do "mysql" to enter the MySQL environment, I get the following error: ERROR 1524 (HY000): Plugin 'auth_socket' is not loaded
I am running MariaDB in this version: mariadb Ver 15.1 Distrib 10.4.10-MariaDB, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64) using readline 5.2
Any help at all would be greatly appreciated as I don't really want to start over again. And as a quick side note, I can still access databases from my applications.