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 1494V-DS400 SER A DISCONNECT SWITCH 3PH 400AMP 600VAC STK 5039
$1220.00
Intel - Core i9-12900K Desktop Processor 16 (8P+8E) Cores up to 5.2 GHz Unloc...
$619.99
Intel - Core i7-12700K Desktop Processor 12 (8P+4E) Cores up to 5.0 GHz Unloc...
$419.99
Intel Xeon E5-2697A V4 2.6GHz CPU Processor 16-Core Socket LGA2011 SR2K1
$39.99
Intel Core i5-8500 3 GHz 8 GT/s LGA 1151 Desktop CPU Processor SR3XE
$49.99
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core 32-thread Desktop Processor
$319.99
Intel - Core i9-14900K 14th Gen 24-Core 32-Thread - 4.4GHz (6.0GHz Turbo) Soc...
$619.99
E5-2697V4 INTEL XOEN SR2JV 18 CORE 2.30 GHz 45M 9.6 GT/s 145W PROCESSOR CPU
$49.99
Intel Core i5-12400 Desktop Processor With HeatSink
$140.00
Intel i7-8700 Coffee Lake 3.2GHz 6-Core Max Turbo 4.6GHz Processor
$48.70