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.
Cisco SG95-16 16-Port Gigabit Switch SG95-16-KR
$47.00
Cisco WS-C3750-48PS-S 48-Port Managed Gigabit Switch
$45.00
Cisco WS-C2960C-8PC-L 2960-C 8 Ports PoE Manageable Switch 1 Year Warranty
$77.00
Juniper EX4200-48T 48 Ports Layer 3 POE Ethernet Switch 1 Year Warranty
$71.00
New Linksys SE3005 5-port Gigabit Ethernet Switch
$15.99
Linksys SE3008 8 Ports Rack Mountable Gigabit Ethernet Switch
$18.99
*NETGEAR PROSAFE (JGS524V2) 24-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch *NO AC*
$29.99
TP-Link TL-SF1005D 5-Port 10/100Mbps Fast Ethernet Desktop Switch
$12.99
YuanLey 10 Port Gigabit PoE Switch With 8 Poe Unmanaged with 2 1000Mbps Uplink
$20.00
HP JG937A Flexnetwork 5130-48G PoE+ 48-Port Gigabit Network Switch
$67.95