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.
SanDisk 1TB SSD Plus, Internal Solid State Drive - SDSSDA-1T00-G26
$74.99
Western Digital 1TB WD Blue PC Desktop 3.5'' Internal CMR Hard Drive - WD10EARZ
$44.99
Western Digital 1TB WD Gold Enterprise Class SATA Internal HDD - WD1005FBYZ
$84.99
HP OMEN 16-k0013dx 16.1" FHD Laptop i7-12700H 16GB 1TB SSD RTX 3050ti W11H
$829.99
Netac 1TB 2TB 512GB Internal SSD 2.5'' SATA III 6Gb/s Solid State Drive lot
$23.99
Patriot P210 128GB 256GB 512GB 1TB 2TB 2.5" SATA 3 6GB/s Internal SSD PC/MAC Lot
$14.99
Crucial - P3 Plus 1TB Internal SSD PCIe Gen 4 x4 NVMe
$69.99
1TB HDD/SSD 2.5" SATA Hard Drive for Laptop with Win 10/Win 11 Pro Pre-installed
$29.95
1TB/2TB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Thumb U Disk Memory Stick Pen PC Laptop Storage US
$26.29
Fanxiang 4TB 2TB 1TB SSD 550MB/s 2.5'' SATA III Internal Solid State Drive lot
$198.99