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.
Dell PowerEdge R720 Server - 2x8c CPU,256Gb RAM, 128Gb SSD/3x900Gb SAS, Proxmox
$340.00
Supermicro 4U 36 Bay Storage Server 2.4Ghz 8-C 128GB 1x1280W Rails TrueNAS ZFS
$712.98
CSE-118 Supermicro 1U 3x GPU Server 2.6Ghz 20-C 128GB CX353A 2x1600W PSU Rails
$454.03
Dell PowerEdge R630 8SFF 2.6Ghz 20-Core 128GB Mem 2x10G+2x1G NIC 2x750W PSU
$399.04
Intel Xeon Gold 6140 SR3AX 2.3GHz 18-Core Processor CPU
$39.99
Intel Xeon E5-2697A V4 2.6GHz CPU Processor 16-Core Socket LGA2011 SR2K1
$39.99
Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 2.4GHz 35MB 14-Core 120W LGA2011-3 SR2N7
$17.99
SR1XP Intel Xeon E5-2680 v3 12 Core 30MB 2.5GHz LGA 2011-3 A Grade Processor
$5.09
Dell Precision T5600/t5610 Xeon E5-2670 2.6Ghz 16GB DDR3 RAM NO HDD Nvidia
$90.00
Rare WaterCooled HP Z800 Workstation Dual Xeon X5680 16GB RAM 120GB SSD Nvidia
$279.56