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.
AMD EPYC 7282 CPU Processor 16 Cores 32 Threads 2.8GHZ up to 3.2GHZ 120W no lock
$76.00
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 i5-6500 3.2GHz 6MB SR2L6 / SR2BX Skt. FCLGA1151 Desktop Processor CPU
$24.50
Intel Xeon E5-2697A V4 2.6GHz CPU Processor 16-Core Socket LGA2011 SR2K1
$39.99
Intel Core i7-14700K Unlocked Desktop Processor
$409.99
Intel Core i5-12600KF Desktop Processor 10 (6P+4E) Cores up to 4.9 GHz Unlocked.
$145.59
Intel Quad Core i3-12100 3.3GHz 12MB LGA1700 12th Gen. CPU Processor SRL62
$46.08
Intel Core i7-13700K 3.40GHz 16-Core CPU LGA1700 BX8071513700K
$339.99