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.
1U BareMetal pfsense opnsense Router Firewall DNS Server 6x 10GB Ethernet Ports
$149.00
Dell PowerEdge R730xd Server 2.60Ghz 32-Core 64GB 800GB SSD Debian Linux
$836.80
POGO Linux WEBWARE 1150 Rack-Mount Server Pentium 4 2.8GHz 512MB - No Drives
$179.99
32GB Web HTML HTTP Server, Great tool for eBay seller & kids to host web site
$229.99
2 x HP ProLiant BL460c (447707-B21) Blade Servers No RAM No HDD
$30.00
IBM CS821 20-Core 2.827GHz 128Gb 1.92Tb SSD 1U Linux Server - 8005-12N Power 8
$449.96
IBM E850 Power8 2x 12C 3.02GHz 512Gb 1.8Tb SAS 10GbE 16Gb Linux Server 8408-E8E
$674.96
PFSENSE 15" Depth Server Router Firewall Supermicro X11SSH-F E3-1240 V5 32GB RAM
$382.00
Barracuda BBS490a / BNHW004 Backup Server No HDD with Power Cord
$249.99
Australia - Win/Linux Server- 2GB RAM, 1 Core,100 GB HD, Ultd Bandwidth 2 yrs
$193.08