Unfortunately, modern web browsers are horrible pigs. No matter what distro you put on this thing, interacting with webpages will be s-l-o-w. (I have a similar laptop—2 GB RAM, Athlon64x2 CPU—running Gentoo, and while it’s functional in its primary job of “larger-screen video iPod for 720p or less”, starting a browser takes a while.) The niche your friend wants to make this machine fill is about the worst one possible for it.

Gentoo specifically switches off the telemetry (-Daudacity_has_sentry_reporting=off,-Daudacity_has_crashreports=off). The cloud saving facility is also off by default, but can be added to the build by enabling the audiocom USE flag.