Since it's written in assembler, shouldn't this virus be more properly called an "x86 virus" rather than a "Windows virus" or a "Linux virus"?
I still don't see this as a problem since it only affects executables in your home directory. It would be different if it somehow could run those executables in a chroot or sudo environment. Then I'd be worried.
Now that all platforms are essentially running on Intel chips, I would expect virus writers to move to machine code. I'm surprised they haven't already.