Fortunately, this fucking windows partition I only keep for VR with my shitty Oculus Rift CV1 reminds me how fucked up the alternative is. I can't fucking wait to get a Steam Frame and ditch it.
Laptops typically come with their own driver management software. Windows was probably trying its best to get something compatible installed, when your existing driver became outdated. There's a decent chance that MSI supplies some specific driver for your laptop that Windows won't touch or try to override through their own software.
Still, nice that Linux supplied better drivers by default!