Which distro supports partial upgrades? AFAIK no major distro supports it.
The only difference between Arch and any other regular distro is simply that in Arch there are no major upgrade versions, so any breaking changes you have to perform them manually. Period.
In the rest, they do it for you. But they update key components as well and/or stop getting updated at some point (same as not updating Arch).
For example, I am a happy Fedora user, but I don't get why they don't upgrade the Plasma or Gnome version in the same release but they do upgrade the kernel, when the kernel update may bring more breaking changes...
The only difference between Arch and any other regular distro is simply that in Arch there are no major upgrade versions, so any breaking changes you have to perform them manually. Period.
In the rest, they do it for you. But they update key components as well and/or stop getting updated at some point (same as not updating Arch).
For example, I am a happy Fedora user, but I don't get why they don't upgrade the Plasma or Gnome version in the same release but they do upgrade the kernel, when the kernel update may bring more breaking changes...