I am wondering if installing the gnome desktop environment from ubuntu software center will cause my whole operating system to crash?

I know this sounds a bit weird but, couple of days ago, my father who had the ubuntu 12.04 LTS installed on his desktop PC tried to switch from unity to gnome environment following the steps given in this link:

<http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-install-classic-gnome-desktop-in-ubuntu-12-04-precise.html>

Neither of us is sure what happened, but after a few days using GNOME when he turned on his PC, there was something like a "black screen of death"...

...bunch of fixes that were going on and we had to wait for about half an hour pressing "Y" to proceed with every fix being done at the time. My father blamed the gnome fallback session for causing the problem but I am somehow not quite convinced that this was the actual problem.

Anyway, I find the GNOME desktop environment much more useful for my purpose. So will I experience the very same problem my father had on 12.04 if I try out GNOME on my laptop running 13.10?