I currently use newspaper for my beardie. I realize you said you didn’t want to use it and would prefer sand. My biggest problem with the sand was the smell and the dust in my apartment. What would happen is that the dry sand would suck the moisture out of the urates and stool, so even though the sand didn’t actually have any urates or stool it would still smell.

When it came time to do a full clean it was a nightmare. I used a shop vac a few times and the static electricity that would build up would cause the sand to 'volcano' out of the shop vac when I opened it to dump the sand into a garbage bag. If you like physics it was kind of neat; if you like a clean floor...not so much.