Deuan 1.0 is an excellent alternative if you want to stick to the original Unix philosophy, and (like me) have gotten fed up with systemd's sloppiness towards more complex use cases.
But it isn't the easiest to access. Stuck with the Linux 3.16 kernel, it often struggles with new hardware, and you may not want to spend a partition or two to have it as a test/alternative system. Turns out that you don't have to. Using a poor man's install of Knopix, you can easily accomodate Devuan, set up almost exactly like Debian live Jessie/Stretch. And running under kvm, you have the infrastructure necessary to do all the installation and downloading you need using the connection through Knoppix.
I have described the procedure for Debian 8.3/9.1 elsewhere, and basically the same will work for Devuan. You drop the squashfs live system file in an easily accessible place, set up a volume for persistent store where it is convenient, and define the correct boot parameters. Nest, you can turn to Devuan ASCII, their version of Debian stretch, which is under development right now, starting to become useful. And using a much more updated kernel.
ALLEN BRADLEY 281G-F12S-10B-RRG-CBG /C AMORSTART MODULE 280G-FS-10-RG STK 2911
$380.00
Intel - Core i7-12700K Desktop Processor 12 (8P+4E) Cores up to 5.0 GHz Unloc...
$419.99
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core 32-thread Desktop Processor
$319.99
Intel - Core i9-12900K Desktop Processor 16 (8P+8E) Cores up to 5.2 GHz Unloc...
$619.99
Intel Core i7-6700 3.40 GHz QUAD Core (4 Core) Desktop Processor 8MB LGA 1151
$59.99
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D 4.2GHz 8 Core 16 Thread Gaming Desktop Processor Used
$262.19
Intel Core i7-6700 SR2L2 4.00 GHz LGA 1151 Quad-Core Processor
$58.00
Intel Core i7-14700K Unlocked Desktop Processor
$409.99
Intel i7-8700 Coffee Lake 3.2GHz 6-Core Max Turbo 4.6GHz Processor
$49.01
Intel Core i7-13700K 3.40GHz 16-Core CPU LGA1700 BX8071513700K
$339.99