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.
A-Tech 8GB DDR3 1600 PC3-12800 Laptop SODIMM 204-Pin Memory RAM PC3L DDR3L 1x 8G
$13.99
HyperX FURY DDR3 8GB 16GB 32GB 1600 MHz PC3-12800 Desktop RAM Memory DIMM 240pin
$12.90
Samsung 128GB (4x 32GB) M86B4G70DM0-CMA3 PC3-14900L 4Rx4 DDR3 ECC Reg Server Mem
$39.99
A-Tech 8GB PC3-12800 Desktop DDR3 1600 MHz Non ECC 240-Pin DIMM Memory RAM 1x 8G
$13.99
Lot of 2 32GB DDR4 2666 PC4-21300 SODIMM RAM Modules Mixed Brand
$60.00
HyperX FURY RAM DDR4 16GB 8GB 32GB 4GB 3200 2666 2400 2133 Desktop Memory DIMM
$9.64
(LOT OF 14) 8GB DDR3 RAM Laptop Memory Timetec
$112.00
Kingston HyperX FURY DDR3 8GB 16GB 32G 1600 1866 1333 Desktop Memory RAM DIMM
$13.25
A-Tech 256GB 4x 64GB 4Rx4 PC4-19200 ECC Load Reduced LRDIMM Server Memory RAM
$287.96
A-Tech 128GB 2x 64GB 4Rx4 PC4-19200 ECC Load Reduced LRDIMM Server Memory RAM
$143.98