For linux users, you can open the .FON files with fontforge, then go to file menu -> generate to create a .bdf file (I prefer to use bitmap over ttf to avoid any artifacts).
See: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BitmapFontConversion
As a side effect, the fonts will probably work better as OTB anyway. At least, that’s my experience.
Xorg isn't going anywhere for a very long time.
This sort of "lets rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite, ad infinitum" stuff is a major problem with the open source community. It leads to an enormous amount of wasted effort in an area where effort is always needed to address real problems around usability and hardware compatibility.
The usability improvements on the Linux desktop happened in spite of X11. The conversation is about font rendering—and why should font rendering be a part of your windowing system? For most apps, it’s not—it’s in Pango, and Pango dropped support for X fonts. All of these changes which already happened have been eroding whatever advantages X11 offered in the first place.
So it’s time to decentralize all the random functionality in X11, and just move it into client-side libraries.
The other problem is priorities. There are a million other much higher priority things: better hardware support, better support for laptop power management, endless usability improvements to desktop apps, etc.
Matter of fact, rendering everything is moving to client side, hence why X is increasingly unnecessary, and why Wayland is designed the way it is.
Oh, and among "Wayland fans" you can count just about everyone who knows anything about the Linux graphics stack, except maybe for Keith Packard. So yes, getting traction is important, because no one wants to keep maintaining the broken X architecture. Xorg is largely maintained by Red Hat who have put it in "hard maintenance" mode with virtually no new development.
I prefer stability.
Meanwhile, Wayland has pretty much the same graphics server architecture that Windows and macOS had decades ago. It finally brings the Linux desktop architecture in line with the state of the art. There may be a rough transition period, but the faster the Linux community pulls together and rips the X band-aid off, the shorter that period will be.
I do want to include .bdf fonts in future versions, especially if the conversion is as simple as that. But if I do it I want to be sure I do it correctly, and I'm still not 100% familiar with the format.
I'd be interested in generating some bitmap conversions of some classic non-VGA fonts, like Apple's bitmap fonts (some of which were never converted to TrueType!) and some X11 standards like fixed13.
This .ttf is far from final however, as it still needs an encoding with proper Unicode mapping, some height/metric adjustments, and so on. The specific changes depend on the font, but they can be done in Fontforge, which is very scriptable thankfully. The same goes for things like aspect correction (mark all glyphs, scale down on the X-axis) and producing embedded bitmaps (add "bitmap strikes" at the target pixel/point sizes, export w/"bitmap in TTF/OTF" option).
Fontforge's bitmap export options should also let you create bitmap-only fonts in formats like .bdf or .otb. As I still use only .fon for bitmap fonts (though this should change in the future), I do those in a different program named Fony, which like Bits'N'Picas can import the glyphs from a .png and export to .fon after some adjustments and metadata massaging.
More details than that would probably belong in a blog post or so, but that's it in a nutshell.
I didn't even know FF Even Had a GUI until I read your comment