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.
Supermicro 4U 4x Nvidia GPU AI Server 3.8Ghz 8-Core 256GB 2x10G SFP+ 2x2200W
$3472.00
Supermicro 4U 4x Nvidia GPU AI Server 2.6Ghz 8-Core 256GB 2x10G SFP+ 2x2200W
$1382.00
Supermicro 4U 4x Nvidia GPU AI Server 3.6Ghz 8-Core 256GB 2x10G SFP+ 2x2200W
$1732.00
Intel - Core i9-13900K 13th Gen 24 cores 8 P-cores + 16 E-cores 36M Cache, 3 ...
$689.99
Intel - Core i7-13700K 13th Gen 16 cores 8 P-cores + 8 E-cores 30M Cache, 3.4...
$489.99
Apple Mac Pro Processor Tray 5,1 2010 2012 2.4ghz 8 core
$79.99
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
Dell Optiplex 5060 SFF 8th Gen Core i7 3.2GHZ 16GB 512GB Win 11 Pro
$249.00
Lenovo Loq 15Irh8 15" Laptop Core i5-13420H GeForce RTX 2050 16GB 512GB SSD W11H
$499.99