The one year period of waiting after leaving one seems excessive.

It's slightly better than that for the person who leaves. It's a one year period starting the moment they joined the previous one. So if you've been part of a family for 1+ years you can join/create a new one right away.

The slot you occupied however does stay locked for an additional year.

I also have my current setup with found family and as I live close to a country border I cannot switch over properly as I have members on both sides of the border. I understand their intent is "same household", so I do understand why this is the case, still sucks for me though.

I hope they have good separation of the logical family and the physical pc’s, It’s really annoying to resetup stuff with my partner every time one of us installs a different linux distro.

After toying around in the beta, this seems to not be an issue anymore as they seem to actually go off accounts now and not hardware anymore. It was quite frustrating in the old system though.