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.
ASUS H110M-R Motherboard Intel 6th/7th Gen LGA1151 DDR4 Micro-ATX i/o shield
$42.00
Gigabyte GA-Q170M-D3H-GSM LGA1151 DDR4 Desktop Motherboard w/ I/O Plate
$49.99
Asus Prime H310M-A R2.0 Intel LGA 1151 DDR4 Desktop Motherboard
$54.99
ASRock B550M Pro SE AM4 DDR4 SATA 6Gb/s 1 PCIe 4.0 x16 Micro ATX Motherboard
$84.99
MSI PRO B650-P WiFi AMD AM5 DDR5 WiFi 6E ProSeries Motherboard
$95.95
Asus Prime A320M-K mATX AM4 Motherboard (Ryzen 1000-5000 Ready)
$49.99
Asus H81M-C Intel LGA1150 DDR3 Desktop Motherboard MicroATX Socket H3
$23.99
Asus Prime H570-PLUS LGA1200 ATX Motherboard | Fast Ship, US Seller
$64.97
Gigabyte M-ATX motherboard with Intel Core i3 8100 CPU and 8GB DDR4 RAM
$84.00
ASUS B85M-E Motherboard Intel B85 (4th Gen) LGA1150 DDR3 microATX
$39.99